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Wednesday, 25 September 2002
Ah, good progress on the novel. I finished a rough draft of what might end up being chapter 1. I started chapter 3 (which follows directly after the 1st in sequence with the same character). Chapter 2 is a different POV and I needed to think about it a bit more--which I did over dinner, and then started it as well.
Chapter 1 came in at almost 1200 words. A salable novel these days might run around 90,000–120,000 words, which means that my chapter 1 is around 1% of a novel. It's probably shorter than the later chapters will be--it just introduces a character and sets him on his path of troubles--but it's still a bit daunting to imagine a hundred such chapters.
I'm particularly enjoying chapter 2. So far it is going much more easily than chapter 1 did. Maybe the worst of the struggling is over. On the other hand, I've only got about 400 words of chapter 2 and only about 100 words of chapter 3, so it's a bit early to be saying that.
Aside from that it was a good day. I wrote a lot, but I also had time for some reading and a walk. I played a bit of a computer game. Jackie and I had dinner at the Basmati, then watched an episode from our Buffy season 2 DVDs. My dad called and we chatted for a bit.
I read an article in Wired about Lawrence Lessig, which mentioned that he used a typewriter font based on characters from an actual typewriter. That sounded like exactly what I've been looking for. I'd tried once before to find a font that looked like an actual typewriter, but all the fonts I found were either trivial variations on Courier, or else overly distressed, like an old, abused actual typewriter. (I used one of the latter to produce the "Philip Brewer's Writing Progress" graphic that's at the top of this page.) Anyhow, I hurried to the P22.com website and downloaded the font. (It's free.) I'll probably change it all to courier before I submit the manuscript, but I've been using it as I write. It's almost perfect.What I really ought to do is get a type face made that copies the old Underwood typewriter that I had when I was in high school. It has a wonderfully handsome font.
I hope your day went as well as mine.