Well, it is over. The contest is complete, but, alas, Taxi Adventure is not. I gave it a shot, I gave it a run, but in the end, it grew out from under me. That’s not a bad thing.
At the end of day two, I posted that I had found solutions to the problems of who, what, how, and why, and I was going to work all night on writing out the scenes. When I went to work on the text, however, I found that my scene plan was out of whack. I had proposed and planned scenes without knowing the full details of the plot, and once I knew them, most of the scenes no longer fit where they were, and many no longer fit at all. Any writing done in the scenes that “no longer fit at all” was wasted, and wasting writing time in the contest (and mostly anywhere) is unacceptable. I did work through the night, but what I did was rearrange and block out scenes to fill in the plot the way I had imagined. While this work was important, it did actually knocked my word count down a bit.
So today all I had to do was fill in the blanks I had created. No problem. Except, it rapidly became clear that there were more blanks than I could fill in the allotted time. It was always going to be a big challenge: the book covers twenty-four hours, with one chapter per hour; each chapter will average about three scenes, for a total of seventy-two scenes. Even without taking time to sleep, success would mean writing one scene per hour, a horrific pace, for three days straight. By early today, I had become completely confident that it will be a good book, but I had been compelled to accept that it would not be a three-day book. If I had to choose one or the other, I would choose good. Still, I entered the contest to win.
So, in summary, at the beginning of day three I had almost the first half of the book written, to the point where I had finally been forced to figure out for myself what was really going on. At the beginning of the final day, I reorganized the scenes so that they made sense according to the new plot, a process which took over than four hours. For the balance of the time, I wrote to fill in the scenes that I had planned. At first, I worked straight through, not avoiding the difficult scenes that chewed up time. Toward the end, I skipped through, filling in easy bits to boost my word count. I was going to come up short anyway, but I wanted to feel better about it.
Then, at midnight, time expired. Someone, somewhere, is holding the winning manuscript right now. But not I, not here, not this time.
Sometime soon I will post a recap of the entire event, an after-action review of what worked, what didn’t, and how I might succeed in the attempt next year.
And I do want to compete again next year. It’s an exhilarating contest, and I want to finish, but I also want to do better than than that. I want to win.
