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so close, so far
Well, I was never gonna get 7500 words done today, and in the end I decided to make it a usual not-writing day because I have 3 writing days coming up and trying to kill myself getting it done today just seemed dumb. So much as I wanted it to be, the book is not done today. OTOH, this is because it’s heading in for 20% over its projected length, not because I didn’t write as much as I hoped to. 61K this month, and about 105K for the year, which makes me very happy. That’s more than half of what I managed to write *total* last year.
Honestly, a big part of why I wanted to get the book done in March (besides the projects listed below) was that I came up with the idea about mid-February and I really kinda wanted to go from conception to completion in 6 weeks. Well, I guess it was 7 anyway, looking at the dates, so 8 will be close enough. :)
April’s (ideal) projects: finish this book, write 2-4 short stories, add 3-5 chapters to MAGIC & MANNERS and…finish my nephew’s book. Bahahahah. Right. That’ll get slotted into May, then, eh? Yes, well. Perhaps I can also get that map done for that other project and get the ball rolling there, at least. (That other project was going to be May’s project. Not so much, apparently.) And I can get enough revisions done to this project to send it to the agent, which would be really good, actually. It would make pushing the other project into the summer less dismaying. So.
Going to go watch something or read something and collapse into bed early because OMG tired.
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jumping around
In the last several books I’ve written, I’ve noticed a tendency that as I approach the end, I leap ahead, write the end, then come back and fill bits in.
I have been doing that for this whole bloody book.
Now, I know people who work this way as a matter of course, but I don’t, and I don’t like it, and seriously, what’s that all about anyway?
This evening I realized that it’s because I’m writing the end. I mean, yes, the end happens to be 100,000 words long, but when you’ve got a million or so words preceding that, basically, the last hundred grand is just flat out The End.
I don’t like it, but at least it makes sense to me now, and helps explain part of the difficulty I’m having writing the wretched book.
The value of ‘difficulty’ should, of course, be remembered as “approximately 40K in the last week,” which may just go to show how skewed my standards are. But nobody ever accused me of holding myself to reasonable standards.
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chugga chugga
16.5K in the past two days. Pretty good. If I can get 5K in tomorrow (she said dubiouly) I’ll be at 60K on the book going into the four remaining days of this blitz.
I am at the stage of the book where I’m not at all convinced I have enough story to get to the wordcount I need. The flip side of that is: last book. It’s going to need denouement. Possibly quite a lot of denouement. So I’m probably fine. I said nervously.
A young woman with a (quite excellent) Rogue stripe and a supremely cute baby sat down at the next table a few minutes ago and admired my Spider-Man hoodie. I was obliged, after a while, to get up and buy a bottle of water so I could get a look at the top of her head, to see how she’d done her stripe. She’s done the front, like mine, but then she’s also taken the top layer of the hair immediately behind that and bleached it as well. I might have to try that next time, because it gives a much wider stripe than I’ve got.
But now, home and away from writing for the evening. *vrooms*
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writing blitz ahoy
thinks to do today:
–
buy the new bon jovi album
–buy the new bowie album
–buy the latest marvel ultimate graphic novel collection book
–write 10,000 words(9200 is close enough)it is possible that one of those things is not like the others.
putting my head down for the next several days–through the 17th, if worst comes to worst–to get as many words down on SHAMAN RISES as is humanly possible.
to help myself along, yesterday i bought a new laptop. tablet. tabtop? laplet? yesterday involved too much frustration with the silver sharpie written in large swoops over the old netbook’s screen, and i thought: i do not want to spend the next seven days staring past that and trying to see my work. also it has 18 hours worth of battery, between the tablet and the keyboard, so i will not have to worry about finding a plug-in so my 5 hour netbook battery won’t die. that’ll be grand altogether.
i have even gone so far as to put music on it. this is not like me, because i do not typically listen to music while i write, but yesterday they had very loud talk radio on at the movie theatre where i usually go to work (there’s a cafe area) and i could. not. concentrate. so having music might help on occasion, and it won’t hurt to have it even if i don’t use it.
“happy mother’s day!” ted said when he discovered i’d bought myself a new computer. :) (mother’s day here is this coming sunday. :))
at any rate, ted’s got the week off, so we’re switching work schedules. i’ll be leaving the house to write All Day Long, and he gets to stay home with young indiana. should be good for all of us. :)
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this book is giving me fits.
I have to revise something. I don’t have to do it now, because it’s not structural for the book, but rather for the series. But the damned book is giving me fits, and I wish to hell it wasn’t.
We had a quiet day today, only going to the Citadel again to do some souvenir shopping. I ended up with a bunch of pottery, which is really my favorite thing for mementos. :)
At the local bakery today I encountered an American woman speaking increasingly loudly, in English, to the staff. “Spoons? Do you have SPOONS? WELL THEN HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO EAT THIS?”
Well, you embarrassing excuse for a countryman, you could have bought something that didn’t require goddamned utensils, if you didn’t have any of your own.
I did my best to order everything in French after that. Given that I learned French from Gambit, this … went slightly better than you might expect, actually.
I have gotten a Fitbit. I forget if I’ve mentioned that, but anyway, I quite like it. If you’ve got one and use the Fitbit site and want another fitness friend, you can send me a friend request at cemurphyauthor at gmail dot com (I refuse to connect it to Facebook).
41368 / 70000 words. 59% done!
