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attempting to psych myself up…
I got up a couple minutes after 7 and wandered in to my office to start writing. Felt drowsy and considered going back to bed. Then the garbage men came and I had to run and put the garbage out, and then I thought, well, maybe I just need some fuel, so I had breakfast and checked my email, and, well, now I’m blog posting and am not feeling especially interested in working on my book. I think I’ve entered the Novelist’s Event Horizon. I’ve got just a bit over 20K to go on the book and I’d kind of just like to be done with it already. This would be a bit less mutter-worthy, perhaps, except I keep having Plans to get, you know, ZILLIONS OF WORDS written, and keep coming up around 3K. Nothing is wrong with 3K. 3K is in fact quite decent. It’s just that 3K a day won’t get the book done by Sunday, which I’d really like. However, unless I have a stupendous writing day in the next 72 hours, the book *won’t* be done by Sunday. Damn.
Yes, I know, my life is very hard.
Arright. I’ll go work now.
ytd wordcount: 294,800
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miss spammity spam spam
I completely forgot that I had an interview going up at Dear Author today. It’s my First Sale Story, which I still think is pretty funny. :) (Dear Author also gave me a quite nice review of TQB, which I thought was, well, nice of them. :))
I actually wrote some New Material today. Only about 1500 words, and I ended up moving what had been the end of this chapter into another chapter, so now I’ve got 10 or 15 pages to write to finish this chapter. Again. But then I’ve also only got that much, probably, to finish the next one, and I’ve got 2700 words or so of stuff I’ve already written that goes into either the next one or the chapter after that, and…and, well, look, I’ve only got 3 squares of the Novelist’s Event Horizon Chocolate left, so I can’t have more than 3 chapters left.
Anyway, I’ve stopped writing for the day but I’m feeling quite enthusiastic about writing tomorrow. There’s a lot of stitching together left to do, but there’s enough material already written that maybe it won’t be too traumatic. I think I’ll walk less tomorrow, and write more.
Now, however, I think I’ll go throw myself on Ted’s mercy and plead for dinner, because SO HUNGRY!
ytd wordcount: 185,900
miles to Minas Tirith: 380.6 -
cyoot!
I am being full-force cuted-upon. Lucy, who helped herself to some kind of leftovers from the roast chicken and ran upstairs to avoid being caught and then sat in a corner licking her chops, has come to sit in my lap and purr and kittybread and stick her head in my elbow to make it clear she’s obviously too adorable to kill.
It is, of course, working like a charm. Even when she tries to rid my fur of mats. Like, say, the mat that’s my wristbone: *lick lick lick gentle gnawing*
Yesterday, no, Friday, when I was working, I had a horrible moment of facing the Novelist’s Event Horizon and desperately wanted to eat something Not Good For Me, and lo! there was expensive dark chocolate from Sammy and Myles! and it was good. and it helped. :)
I broke 175K for the year today. *headdesk*
ytd wordcount: 175,100
miles to Minas Tirith: 285.4 -
pattern recognition
Those of you who’ve been reading along for a while may have deduced a certain … unreasonably high level of expectation placed on me by my own self. There’s a Longfellow quote which summarises this nicely: “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”
I am *mired* in this problem right now. My expectation of myself is that really, I can do a 6400 word chapter in a day. I *know* I can. I’ve done it any number of times in the past. I can’t do it for more than about a week, but I don’t *need* to: five days or so at that rate would finish the book. And so dammit, I *know* I can do it, that I *need* to do it…
…and yet *damn* my brain is tired. Even typing up yesterday’s 3K pretty much felt like a day’s work today. And while I recognise this pattern, I can’t stop myself from thinking that, well, okay, *tomorrow* I’m going to be able to pull off my 6400 words, and that’ll just get me on the road I need to be on: one good day can lead to four or five more, and then this last awful push will be over. I *recognise* that I’m apparently more accurately capable of 3K a day right now, but 3K a day doesn’t finish the rough draft until the end of the month, which gets the book in *over* three months late, and I cannot get past the idea that if I would just get my shit together, I could push through these last 25,000 or so words and could take a couple days to unwind, then do revisions and get the damned thing in by the beginning of May.
Not really in need of reassurance or anything here, just getting my frustration down in words, in hopes that it’ll do…*something*…to my brain.
ytd wordcount: 168,000
miles to Minas Tirith: 281.4 -
sooooooo envious
Approximately half the known world, or at least half my known world, will be in New York this weekend for Comic Con, and I am *so* envious. Sadly, though, we didn’t win the lottery yesterday, so we’re not jet-setting off the the Big Apple. Maybe next year…
I guess I got up too early. I was exhausted before I did anything, and then the cats sat on me when I sat down to write, and they emitted sleep rays, and I succumbed. Ted got up before I’d entirely fallen asleep, and suggested I go to a cafe and write longhand, which idea I followed through on, because I clearly needed something to shake myself up a little, not to mention to keep myself awake. I got about five pages written, then met Ted for lunch and followed it up with glasses-shopping with Kate, then went to the library to try to work some more.
The library, it turns out, is not a good place for me to go to work. There are all of these *books* there, and even if I’m not especially inclined to read them right now, they’re not very well alphabetized. *twitch* *twitch* *twitch* I got another page and a very little done, and was horribly bored with the story, so slogged toward home, hoping the walk might shake an idea or two loose. It did, so I got another page done and know where to pick up tomorrow. I’ll probably type it tomorrow and see if I can’t just charge on from there.
ytd wordcount: 165,100
miles to Minas Tirith: 277.4