So last night, in a fit of mild insomnia, I busted out a bunch of words and managed to make Yesterday a productive day. Then I engaged in the sport that girliejones has dubbed Horn-spotting. Then my internets went wonky, so I went back to bed. Anyway, for the record:
I’m tempted to try and hit 50k today, although given that it’s almost lunchtime and I’m yet to write anything (and the house needs cleaning prior to an inspection tomorrow) that may be a tad too ambitious.
My life seems to be settling into a comfortable word-count routine again, which is good news in terms of getting the novel draft finished but somewhat crap in terms of interesting blogging. I have noticed how much easier this whole novel-writing-thing is when you actually have a midpoint to the story – perhaps the first real tangible sign I’ve had that this whole planning thing (even in the minuscule levels of planning that I’m doing) is likely to work for me. I actually caught myself thinking “36,000 words, that’s nothing” as I looked over the notes last night. Slowly but surely the writer-brain is finally catching up with the ambition.
Today there will be writing, followed by marking, followed by Death Race if time allows. And if all that gets done before eleven o’clock tonight, there may even be a few hours spent tinkering with the Claw draft.
Yesterday I shaved off the scraggly neck-beard I’ve been sporting since Conjecture, cracked my knuckles, and proceeded to write like a furious writerly-thing until I hit the 30k mark on the Black Candy draft. Then I discovered – joy of joys – that I’d written myself up to the point where the narrative reconnected with the middle of the novella-length draft/outline I’d written last year, allowing me to cut/paste/edit the next 10,000 words without too much difficulty. Net result:
‘Tis a horrid, splotchy, unreadable mess, this draft of mine, but it is halfway done and actually feels halfway done in terms of narrative. Which is something of an evolution for me, because the last time I hit this point in a novel draft I was still trying to figure out exactly where the story was going. Maybe I will get the hang of this novel-writing thing one of these days.
Of course, being a horrid over-achiever, I then wandered off and spent two hours revising Claw in which I resolved my issues with the structure of the novella’s first chapter.
I can have more days like that one, I think. It’s kinda nice to be doing stuff again.