I hit the 10,000 word mark last night, which is a pretty good feeling. Until I considered the fact that during Nanowrimo, I would have hit that mark six days in; this time it took nearly a month.

But this isn’t Nanowrimo. It’s easy to forget that, although I’m working on it. Naturally I’m inclined to compare writing this novel with writing my two previous ones; it’s my only frame of reference. But the one downside of Nanowrimo was that it made me less patient with the process of writing. And as I’ve said before, if you want to be a published novelist, you need nothing if not patience.

So yeah, 10,000 words. I’m definitely putting words on the page, and if I pick up my pace just a little bit, I should easily have a completed draft by the end of this year. One thing that’s different this time around is that I feel like I have a better sense of where revisions are going to be needed. Some scenes will need to be fleshed out, a lot of segments will need to be reworded to be clearer, that sort of thing. I think editing The Northerners really taught me a lot in that respect.

I could go back and rewrite chapters now, but during Nanowrimo I took the shark’s approach of constantly moving forward, and I think that works the best for me; better to revise when you have the full story laid out in front of you anyway.

The other interesting thing is that I’m still writing the story in order. Back in college, I discovered that I could write papers much more quickly, and with better results, if I simply wrote paragraphs as they came to me and then tied them all together at the end. I figured this approach might work for a novel, but so far I haven’t felt any need to try it. Writing The Northerners in order actually seemed to help me a lot; I could feel out the pace as I went, almost as though I were reading the book instead of writing it. So far with Hubris I’m having similarly positive results.

I’m starting to approach a sort of unexplored area of the story, though, which I haven’t outlined yet, so we’ll see if my technique holds strong. If not, well, it’s just more revising.