Disappointing day at the Word Mine

I did get some stuff written today, but not nearly enough. I finished off the chapter I started last night, adding 1550 words there, and tossed another fifteen-hundred on other jobs. The total for the day was 3000 or so, which is well below the mark I need to be hitting.

What happened?

Life. I had errands to run, and then had to go to DracoVista Studios to tape Dragonpage Cover to Cover. Doing the show was great: we interviewed J. C. Hutchins and actually went so long we’re splitting the interview in half. You’ll really enjoy that. The drive to and from the studio, however, was an hour each way. That really eats up the time and saps some energy. I’m not sure I could get much work done if I was using Mass Transit, but given the state of it here in Phoenix, that’s not a proposition I have to test.

Getting sidetracked is a big problem when you’re working on a project. I finished the one chapter with about an hour to go before I had to leave for the studio. I needed to get lunch and a shower. Not enough time to do a chapter, or to even start one, primarily because I’d not figured out exactly what I wanted to do in the next chapter. Given those two things, it would have been very easy to walk away from the story and wait for some inspiration to come—a strategy that won’t work if I’m going to get even close to hitting a deadline.

So what to do? The first thing is to identify the problem: not knowing what to do next. So I sat down, looked at my outline notes and the notes that I’d be jotting while planning and writing, and worked out what I wanted to do in the next chapter. I jotted down a handful of notes, picking up on a couple of themes that were recently building up. I made a note about strengthening a couple areas of contrast, both to accentuate things in this book, and set things up for the rest of the books.

I also found myself in the same position I mention to students: I had to make a note and will change things later. Turned out that I needed a character to be blind in one eye, and hadn’t done that when he was introduced. I’ll retrofit that bit of description in rewrite, and just keep it going through the rest of the book. If I’d taken the time to go back and make the change now, I’d have gotten even fewer words added to my total.

Now, however, I am going to have to push hard. I have a speaking engagement tomorrow night, a meeting on Saturday, soccer on Sunday and a class to teach on Monday night. Fortunately I’m hitting a part of the book where it should actually become easier to do three chapters in a day. We’ll see how long I can keep that up.

November word count: Hard: 12480 Soft: 4563