Wordcount: Zero.

And that's a good thing.

No, wait, bear with me on this. I've written under deadline before, and it's something I do pretty well. I know, some of you are worried: can he make this wordcount? He only writes five hundred words a day on average! And he misses 20% of his days. And even though he always makes up for missed wordcount later, he's never mentioned on this blog that it takes him weeks to do so!

All that is true. However, on a typical day, I write for between ninety minutes and two hours. Since my income has never been dependent on writing before, I can't afford to devote more time to it.

Now I can, for this week at least. And in crunch times when I do nothing but write all day (Yuletide, for example, when I do the fic exchange), I can easily hammer out four or five thousand words in a day.

My concern isn't six thousand words.

It's six thousand words of publishable quality. About half those Yuletide stories I write meet that standard, I'd guess. And without exception, they're the ones that I outline before I write. They're the ones that I research.

Okay, it's true. I'd hoped to be done with the research and outlining yesterday. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. I know a few things about my main character. I know her motives. I hear her voice. I know what it is she finds, sort of. But I don't know why she needs to find her birth parents. I don't know where she lives. I don't know who helps her or gets in her way. And I don't know who those parents themselves are, as people, as characters. Their voices are likely to be important, too.

So I read blogs and books and wiki posts, and I think. Today I'll fit the pieces together, and I'll write some version of my first thousand words. Tomorrow I'll write two thousand. Most of them will be new words, but some of them will be replacing broken bits in the old. The same the day after, and the day after. That will leave me the weekend for revisions (and you had better believe I will want AS MANY BETA READERS AS I CAN GET).

Of course, yesterday wasn't totally unproductive. I felt motivated. So I finished Chapter Eighteen of The Hellion Prince. It should be up sometime after the beginning of next week, as I'm not really planning on revising it now.

Progress.

Word count: 57.

Not done for the day by any stretch, but admittedly the prose has been slow. I have a 15-point outline. I have 8 named characters, and ideas about what they want and how they act. A couple of them may get cut if they're not necessary. I have a setting, and a culture, and at least two well-defined subsets of the culture, which are directly relevant to the plot, and about which I am not ready to talk yet.

I have my central problem, and it's a thorny one. I don't yet know how my heroine resolves it. But that's okay, I don't want my outline to tell me that. I want my heroine to do it, as I get to know her better. She'll tell me how she would define a happy ending, and her choices will show me whether or not she gets it, in the end.

I have several very bad first lines. It's time to ignore them, and work from my outline on the parts I understand the best. I can work back to the opening from that.

Writers out there: how do you approach starting a story? How much marinating and percolating takes place before it's time to put words on the page? To what extent do you outline the shape of your story, and how much do you leave to logical extrapolation as you move along?