Three Quarters of Alice's Adventures At The Poles Completed

One of the nice things about writing a story in 12 chapters of roughly the same length is this. When you’ve written 8 chapters, then it’s two thirds done. However you only have to write one more chapter and then you’re three quarters done. Well, as I’m sure you’ll have guessed, I completed Chapter 9.

The text has picked up great momentum. This can happen for a number of reasons when you’re writing, just the same as your writing can lose momentum for different reasons. I don’t want to go into too much detail, because I don’t want to start summarising the plot. But when you’re writing, especially in the picaresque style I’m using for my Alice story, you can find that you’re writing a character whom you really enjoy writing about and then it becomes easy. So the episode with the character in question was only ever planned to go on for about 1000 words, or a quarter of Chapter IX but as written it now takes about 3000, or three quarters of the chapter. I finished writing the text of the chapter on Christmas Eve, and this meant that I wrote the whole thing across three days, Sunday – Tuesday. I also made the first illustration. Yesterday was Christmas Day, which is sacred family time not to be sacrificed on the altar of illustration.

Today, though, the opportunity presented itself, and I have made three – count ‘em – three more illustrations. This makes four for the chapter and 37 for the first 9 chapters, 1 more than the target. So if, for the sake of argument, I manage to produce a further 11 illustrations for the last 3 chapters then I’ll hit my target of forty eight.

It certainly seems doable. However I’m not putting a timescale on it. I’m back in work tomorrow and that could well change things. I’m also aware that it is just as easy to lose momentum as to gain it. It’s a tricky thing, getting the balance right. When the force is with you and the words are zooming out of your typing fingers at 90mph its natural to want to keep it going, but trying to keep going at this rate when you’re not feeling it any longer can be counter productive. On the other hand, while you don’t want to force it there is something to be said for the self discipline necessary to bring yourself to write at least a little every day. Sometimes I’m not feeling it, and even when I’ve written my target of , let’s say, a hundred words for this short session I’m still not. But there are times when this exercise of adding another 100 words to the story has really kick started things and got the creative juices flowing.

Well, anyway, here’s the illustrations for chapter IX