Sixty thousand words (plus or minus a few)

My novel is now past 60,000 words.

Microsoft Word is now showing my novel has 60,437 words. It has been such slow progress; I am not going to tell when I started writing this thing.  But now it feels like it’s going to be a real novel some day. I’m close to the end (of the plot) so how not to rush, how to stay slow enough that I don’t skimp on the things that this mess-in-progress deserves?   Its allure and complex grime keep calling me back to previous scenes, unanswered questions, pieces of the puzzle that now make sense, or don’t. How to twist things into the right shape, how to fortify what needs strength, how to obliterate the coy, the unnecessary, the overly precious junk?

In my distractions, I do a google search for images, “decrepit carnival,” and find this about a place called Royal Land, which was a sort of recycled carnival that did not travel.  My carnival is a non-traveling carnival, so finding this link (and image, which I love) today, I’m renewed–the serendipity cherubim at google hooked me up.  I love conducting this type of non-scholarly research.  It’s one of the great things about writing fiction, the freedom to make things up, but make things up that are also underpinned with some real things, somehow held together with real wire and string, but not so precisely tethered to the mundane.

Back to work now, as Tom Waits would say, “Hoist that rag.”