The Scenes Have It

As this process moves along I see that things are much more fluid than I expected.  I was focused too much on getting a word count of 80000.  I thought that was the proper length for a novel.  I have since lowered my expectation for the first draft.  It seems better to me to think more in terms of scenes.  I can then focus on world building and character development through the scene.

I lowered my final word count expectation to 70000, I may lower it even more later.  I can see just based on the last scene I wrote that there is a lot of room for expansion of the setting and the characters.  The scene itself was only about 800 words, definitely not long enough.  Yet, the major events that needed to happen did transpire.  I can see now that when I come back to rewrite the scene it will expand.

These characters are just revealing themselves to me.  It seems only fair to leave out the details at the moment and come back and nail it down once I know more about them.

Having lowered the word count, I am now about to hit 50 percent.  This is exciting.