Talk about a marathon…
It’s 2:52am. I’ve been writing for… I don’t know how long… 5 hours, at least. I have a bit of a headache, and my arms and shoulders are sore from a heavy workout yesterday (not to mention sitting at my computer and writing for 5 freakin’ hours!).
I just checked my word count for today. Not counting any editing, I cranked out an astounding 6,223 words. What’s more, that doesn’t count the ~1,200 words I wrote this afternoon and then deleted tonight because I didn’t need the scene. No wonder my neck and shoulders are sore. That’s a freakin’ short story by itself!
I love Wren!
Just a quick update, since I haven’t posted in a while. (I have a good excuse, of course, but the Great Server Adventure of ‘07 is fodder for a whole post by itself.)
In any event, I’m up way past my bedtime. I’ve been writing for what seemed like thirty minutes, but was closer to two hours. Actually, I think I sat down a little after 11pm, so it’s been more like two hours and twenty minutes. But I digress.
Things going swimmingly.
Don’t you just love the word “swimmingly”? It’s such a Cogsworth word. Actually, I think Cogsworth really does say “swimmingly,” but I digress…
I didn’t come here to write about fun words and talking clocks, much as I love Beauty and the Beast. I came to write about smut!
Well, not really. I came to give you an update, but I’m in a weird mood.
A quickie after a long day
I was in the writing mood this afternoon (I didn’t do a thing about clearing my backlog of e-mail… see, I really do have a finite number of words per day in me).
I nuked about 400 words from the beginning of Ch3 (going in a direction I didn’t want to go). They were my usual “I’m not sure where I want to go next, so I’ll go micro.” In any event, they didn’t advance the story, so they went the way of the dodo.
In their place, I cranked out 2,815 words, with a couple of pivotal scenes, which set up some even more important scenes. The upcoming scenes are ones I’ve had in my head for a while now. It’ll be nice to get them “on paper.”
So things are moving along.
Like I said, a quickie update after a long day.
- Nick
It’s A Kind Of Magic
I get a lot of feedback. And even though I rant about the anonymous fuckwits, they’re the minority. They’re an obnoxious minority, but they really are the 0.1% idiots. In reality, I enjoy 99.9% of my feedback. I’m very lucky to have such great readers.
But every once in a while, someone writes something that makes me feel really, really good about life.
Without further ado, I’ll share tonight’s message (suitably anonymized).
B4: the Update
(Why can’t I resist a clever title?)
I just wanted to post a quick update. After the holidays—when I didn’t get much time to write—and then a week-plus of just not being in the mood to write (the first week of the year), I’ve been in a writing mood lately.
I’m not up to my 10,000-words a week of the early days of B1, but I still managed to maintain a pretty good pace last week. The weekend has been different altogether, full of Honey-Do lists and personal projects, but next week should be good.
The Culture of Silence
My grandfather was a study in contrasts. As a child of the Depression, his family lost everything—the family restaurant, the car, the furniture, and finally, the house. Later in life, my grandfather didn’t have something unless he had two of them (or more). He grew up in a time when you could lose anything, including the roof over your head, so you’d better have a spare.
In the last twenty years of his life, he lived like Fred Sanford, with acres of junk scattered across his land. He had more Volkswagen Beetles than I could count, and none of them ran. He had all sorts of cars, trucks, and other machinery. Most of it didn’t work. My grandparents even had two houses. They were both on the same property (one had been moved from another location), connected by a big workshop and a hallway.
But I said that my grandfather was a study in contrasts. Imagine a junk man in tattered overalls, a cap that’s seen better days, maybe socks, and battered shoes. Now imagine that man with a college education, a Masters degree, and a career of military and public service.
The chum is in the water
As promised… It’s 2006, and I just posted the first part of Book 4: Christy. It’s the Prologue only, but that’s what most of you will analyze (and over-analyze) anyway.
If you feel the need to make a snarky comment about deadlines, let me give you a piece of advice: don’t. Even if you think you’re offering a “friendly joke,” don’t do it.
Two good days in a row?
Wow, whoodathunkit?
I had two quiet days at work, and I used the time wisely. Yesterday was a “go home late ’cause I lost track of time while writing” day, and today was an “edit what I wrote yesterday and then crank out another 1-2,000 words” day.
Between yesterday and today, I wrote more than a third of Ch1. Add that to the half-plus that I’d already written, and I’m pretty happy with how it’s shaping up. I’ll probably cut 10% or so when I do a polishing pass, but I don’t think I’ll nuke more than the usual knots and burrs.
2161
Another short post, because I needed to leave 40 minutes ago. I haven’t had much time lately (my weekend was so busy that I barely had time to do one POD, much less two), and I’ve been jonesin’ to write. So I took a couple of hours this afternoon and cranked out 2,161 words.
I’m semi-ashamed to admit that I’m a bit rusty. It took me a little while to work through the first 1,000 words or so, but the last 1,000 came easily.