For Mother’s Day (it’s Mother’s Day today on this side of the pond) I got to take a mini writing retreat to Galway, where my sister’s musical was also premiering. I hopped on the train at 11am on Saturday morning and by 6pm had 8K written and was in such a zone that if I hadn’t had evening arrangements I’d have probably stayed right where I was and written until I collapsed.
However, I did have plans, so I went out to dinner and then to the show, after a slight detour running around the Galway university campus trying to find the performance venue. :)
The place was crowded! In fact, it was a sold-out show with thirty people on the waiting list, and they managed to accommodate everyone after something of a delay in getting seats arranged. The show went over well, with some wonderful imagery and some really terrific songs.
Afterward Deirdre was kind of staggering around stunned and dazed from having just seen the culmination of weeks (months, years) of intensive hard work. It’s not easy writing, producing, directing and choreographing a show, but she did a great job and I’m so very, very proud of her.
I returned to the B&B and slept on a bed that had a lot in common with a bag of rocks. The clocks changed last night, which I’d forgotten when I arranged the weekend (I’d have given myself more time at the B&B in the morning if I had), but I still got 2K written before I had to get on the train home again, and I rounded out the weekend with 15.5K, which is pretty satisfying.
It would, of course, be *more* satisfying if the book had wrapped up at the 55K I was aiming for, instead of currently being at 61K with probably 7500 words left to go. I was giving myself March to write this book in, so I’m now kinda trying to figure out how to get another 7500 words in tomorrow, which seems…unlikely. :)
Anyway, I’m pretty darn pleased with the weekend, despite the book going over its projected count. (Which isn’t actually necessarily a bad thing, given certain realities about the market for Regencies.) I’m still having a grand auld time writing it, which is incredibly important to me right now.
So many other projects coming up, but right now it’s just about finishing this one.
(And about watching Arrow tonight. :))
I find it astounding when an author knows how long a work will turn out to be. There have been times when I thought I was writing a novel that turned out to be a short story, and vice versa. I go till it’s done and then see what I have. My first drafts are generally very clean, so there’s not much rewriting at ll that needs to be done, but I can’t begin to pretend I know how long a piece will be until I’ve finished it.
Regarding Arrow, the spousal unit and I liked the first season well enough, but the entire second season has been filled with over-the-top silliness (and not in a good way) and people making bad decision after bad decision – no, not bad, stupid decisions, which is far worse. We keep watching, with some small hope it will get better, but it hasn’t. Not sure why we’re still sticking with it.
It’s actually very rare that I misjudge a book’s length. I’m not often off by more than 10%, and usually not that much. This is an exception.
I, in direct contrast to you, am finding Arrow to be great fun. :)