Back to the Future

So I wrote another novel.  You should be used to this by now. I've been doing it every year. This was a short one. A novelette, perhaps.

In the end, it was about 20,000 words, which is not the 50,000 word goal, but it is the goal I made for myself when I realized that I just didn't have the time to make the full goal. It also has a beginning, middle, and end, which is really all you can hope for. 

And now that it's done, I've gone through to gather the statistics that I'll compare to all my other stories.  You know, for fun. One of the things I calculate is the top five most used words, and the word "back" shows up in so many Top 5s. It will usually be character names, "said," and "back." People go back, turn back, look back… So I made a concerted effort to not use "back" in this one. So many times, I stopped myself from letting people lean back, reach back, give back… And how did I do? Well, I used "back" about 100 times in a 45 page document, so not well. It's in spot 4 in the Top 5. 

As for the story itself, it was about time travel. I had the vague idea for it at the beginning of last November, but I already had a plan for that, and I wasn't going to derail it for a half baked idea. So my intention was to spend the next year plotting this thing out, because I wanted it to jump between different time periods, following different characters, and that was going to be a lot easier if I knew what everyone was doing and when. Well, I did zero planning until about the last week of October. So I didn't have an outline, I didn't have any characters figured out, and I barely had a plot. Would I have made it to 50,000 words if I have planned it out? Maybe. But I didn't, so there's no point in dwelling on that. 

It is a fun story. Essentially, it revolves around a team sent back in time to retrieve an object from the past, in order to save the future. It had some good ideas, that I didn't really execute to their full potential. Will I revisit and revise it? Maybe. I wrote it with the intention that no one would ever read it, so I had to freedom to write whatever dumb shit I felt like, and I don't intend to change that. If I rewrite it, it will only be to add more dumb shit for my own enjoyment. Lately, I've been trying to write "good" stories that other people will enjoy, and it gets exhausting. Sometimes you just need to write some dumb shit for yourself. 

Right now I'm starting to think about what I'm going to write next. There's always another project. Maybe I'll actually plan out the next one. 

I'll see you… next time.