4000 words and counting

Well, I've spent quite a few hours today with my typewriter as proposed, after clearing some space on my desk and moving it into my room (it actually takes up a fair bit of space).

I was intending to write a short sci-fi story, but as with many of my intentions, things got a little bit out of hand. This is a story that I planned and started about a year ago and again, my style has changed quite noticeable since then.

What I had from last year were 2 drafts up to the first 4000 words and notes on the rest of the story, background detail, characters and world. The basic premise is about a Flight fighter engineer, socially stunted and with family issues who notices a strange spirit causing trouble about the Run and the fighter pilots. It's kind of sci-fi, mystery, supernatural, human relations, with a bit of romance (if you could call it that).

Today (well, technically yesterday), I managed to type up another 4000 words in the space of about 4 hours. Not a bad feat, considering the first set took a few weeks. Here's the dilemma though. I had intended on restricting myself to about 7000 words, but I haven't finished yet and it looks to reach the 15,000 word range. Of course, if I added in everything that I would like, it could very easily reach novel-like proportions - which is not exactly problematic, but is a fair bit of work. There is definitely plenty of scope for more characterisation, back story and event development in the backdrop e.g. a conglomerate attack requiring war committees and goings-on with the higher ups.

What to do? I'm enjoying the whole writing process, so I'm not that upset about continuing, but there are other projects I would like to get started on. Finishing something like this off would be fantastic, but then I'd have to move onto the editing process. The nice thing about writing it all on the typewriter is that it's so dashed difficult to go back and change things, so I just have to keep going forwards. Probably the reason I churned out so much in one go.

Now if only it were so easy to write that much for assignments in short spaces of time. Speaking of which, I should probably be working on some of those too...