Yesterday: 3200 words. I didn’t have the time or energy to write a blog post.
Today, at 2:30: 1400 words of story, plus another 600 or so of simply letting my fingers go when I started feeling stuck. Those words aren’t usable, they’re more of a conversation with myself about what I wanted to accomplish in the chapter and where I needed to go and what was happening. They did the trick. I was stuck and then I wasn’t stuck anymore.
So, after five days of writing: 11,200 words. Compared to a current 7000 in Ghosts of Belize which I’ve been working on for, well, months. The thing that’s definitely helping the most is to keep reminding myself that it’s a first draft, it can be fixed later, but it also helps that I’ve got no worries about meeting other people’s expectations in the back of my brain. This is a different book, so maybe it’ll disappoint people who wanted more Tassamara but it just feels different. Anyway, I’ll put the back of my brain to work on figuring out why that is so and write more about it later, but right now, I’m ready to take a break, maybe a nap, and then get back to work. The fingers are tired, but I’m not ready to give up the momentum. I want to get the next chapter started and moving. It’s a pity I don’t really know what’s going to happen in it.
A pity and also an adventure.
“It’s a pity I don’t know what’s going to happen in it.” That statement is so very funny!
🙂
I’m coming to the conclusion that I am a better pantser than I am plotter. Lots of work plotting out the last two projects that I worked on and they were excruciatingly difficult to write. This one had a beginning scene, a middle scene and an ending, and it’s flying by as I look for the path from one scene to the next.
You know, this was the way Doug got 60,000 words on paper for National Novel Writing Month. The challenge appealed to him and the “spewing” seemed to work. Our mantra was always, “December in national novel editing month.”