Timewaster's Guide Archive

Tonight at 7:00 sharp.  Looks like I'm not going to be able to make it to the little service thing at 6:00, so be here at my house on time, if possible.  (Come early, if you want.)

So, with a nice 12:00am - 6:30am writing session, I finally finished off the new book.  The full title:

Mistborn: Book One
The Final Empire

Pages (Manuscript): 1065
Pages (Times New roman): 803
Word Count (MS Word): 205,739
Size:  1,375 KB
Chapters: 39+epilogue

Planning Begun: November 2003
First Chapter Begun:  Jan 28, 2004
Last Chapter Finished: May 24, 2004

Other interesting facts:
* This is the first book I've written completely as a 'professional' author.
* The most number of pages I wrote in one day while working on this book was 64.  (Last Friday.  When I get near the end, It's tough to stop....)
* Number of pages the book was PLANNED to be: 1,000.  (I'm getting pretty good at this, eh people?  No more accidentally going over by 300 pages.)
* I am very tired.

(Yawn.)  Okay, now I can stop goofing off and get back to editing the book I'm SUPPOSED to be working on.

Just a thought, folks.  I was thinking that maybe the entire forum experience would be more interesting if we tried to explain ourselves a little more.

Let me give an example.  The 'TV Shows you loved as Kids' thread.  A lot of the posts are simply lists.  Now, there's nothing wrong with that--but I wonder if the thread would be more interesting if we tried to give some explanations.  Pick ONE show, instead of a whole list of them, and put it in your post.  Then, tell us why you loved it, or what you think of it now.  Make some sort of contributory comment.

I fell similarly about a lot of the threads, such as those in the Music section.  The "What's Playin'" thread has started to annoy me a little bit.  I started it as an interesting experiment to see what we could learn about each other.  However, people soon started listing five or six songs in one post, and I grew bored, feeling that the thread had simply turned into people listing their favorite music.

Instead, what if you randomly (it HAS to be random) played a song out of your list, then tell us where you got it, why you bought/downloaded it, and what you think of it?  Wouldn't this be more interesting.

Cool Lyrics.  WHY do you think that's a cool lyric?

Quotes.  Who gave the quote!  Half the time these aren't even attributed.  Tell us where you found it, and why you were thinking of it when you decided to post.

Again, I'm not really very annoyed by this; I've just always thought we were missing out on some interesting discussions because people didn't give proper thought to their posts.

Thoughts?

This thread lists changes or updates that have been made to the forum.

How much do you do?  What files do you create?  

I've done it various ways.  Usually I have an 'outline' document for plots, a 'character' document for characters, and a 'world' document for magic systems and things.

Sometimes, the preparatory documents are only a couple dozen pages.  (Elantris.)  Sometimes they're hundreds of pages long.  (Dragonsteel, Way of Kings.)

Do you do any daily preparation--like, before you start writing that day?  Look over your notes, write some new ones, that kind of thing.

So, how long does it take to grow your hair out?  Being a guy, I generally ignore my hair until it simply gets long enough to be annoying.  Then I get it cut, but I don't really pay attention to how long I go between cuts.

So, lets say I have a female character in my book who has boyishly short hair (like, cut really short.)  If she decided to grow it out, how long would it take to get the hair to near shoulder-length?

Moshe's been pressing me on when I'll have the chapter glyphs, web site, and map done.  I know we haven't even discussed the map yet, but do you by chance have a timetable on the other two?

Hey Sprig, have you had any luck with setting up that webcomic browser?  Now that the summer is officially here (for me at least) I'd like to get the TWG webcomics up and running.