36863

I finish the night with a wonderfully symetrical word count for the new novel of 36863. That's a bit over 8k words for the week. This coming week will be a bit more challenging, since I have Trinoccon coming up next weekend, so I essentially lose a weekend of writing. Fortunately, I'm taking the Monday following the con off.

This is perhaps news more appropriate for my Whateverville blog, but my writing time is currently in competition with home improvement time. I'm selling my house, and so a lot of things that were set aside last year when I did the major improvements--new floors, new walls, painting, etc.--are now finally being tackled. Tiny stuff, like fixing the deadbolt on the backdoor, where the lock and the receptacle plate were out of alignment, and painting small bits of trim I never got around to painting, fixing small gap I had left where the new tiles in the bathroom didn't quite meet up with the new linoleum in the office. No huge projects--most of these things are taking me ten minutes to tackle. Just the sheer number of details to tackle makes it overwhelming.

But, of course, there's a parallel there with writing, in that writing any given word on a page isn't tough--most of them flow onto the page without my even having to stop and thing about them. Occasionally, I'll be slowed down by trying to think of a name for a character, trying to figure out what something that doesn't exist in our world might feel or smell or taste like. Any given detail isn't that hard to tackle, but they really accumulate as the scenes and chapters build up. The trick is to set aside the final goal and sit down with a micro goal--one more scene tonight, or just write enough to turn the odometer on the next thousand words. Tomorrow, I'll sit down and think, "Two hundred and thirty seven words to go to 37k. Barely half a page, single spaced. Just a few paragraphs. You can tackle this. Then, once I'm typing, I'll start trying for the end of the scene, or the end of the chapter if its near enough.

Little by little, the writing gets done.