transgender | Debra R. Borys

I’ve been moving along pretty good since setting my goals for Cry Baby Cry a week ago. It’s now over 15,000 words, which means about 3000 words in a week. Not race car winning speeds, but doable.

I also posted two excerpts on my Birthing blog, one showing Avril confronting another trans woman…

Lonny had transitioned late in life and all the hormones and surgical procedures in the world couldn’t disguise her masculine beginnings.

And one showing how Jo’s experiences in the first novel, Painted Black, are coming back to haunt her as she tries to find Zara.

She had learned of Lexie Green’s fate almost a year before, and the nightmares had, thank God, tapered off since then. Avril’s reappearance in her life, however, seemed to have revived those memories with a vengeance.

I have over 13,000 words drafted in the new novel, which I have decided for certain will be titled Cry Baby Cry. One thing I like about using Scrivener to write is that I can set a target goal of how many words I want a book to be and when I want to have the first draft done, and it will keep track of how many words I need to write each day to reach that goal.

I’ve told it I want at least 70,000 words, that I want to complete by Dec.1 and that I will be writing on Wed, Thurs, and Fri. (I also work on other days sometimes, or maybe skip one of my writing days, but it is entirely reasonable that I will be able to write at least three days a week.)

Based on that info, Scrivener tells me I need to write 1321 words a day, three days a week. It revises that number based on each day’s word count, and restarts the daily word count at midnight every night.

As of this week I finished the first draft of five chapters, and have 1500 words completed of Chapter 6. Excerpts of my progress last week can be read HERE. As always, I welcome any feedback on what I’m posting.