Update From the Trenches
Last week was by far my worst week. Exhaustion set in and my brain did not want to cooperate. I had to fight with it every day, every hour, for every word. With the arrival of the weekend came a break-in with our car (more on that at my blog) and even less motivation to write. My team lost its final game of the season, playing so miserably I don’t want to see them in bowl game, and would like my Saturdays back. My wife drug me down to the Humane Society to look at a kitty, a potential playmate for our cat, and after an hour of spending time with her we decided she would be just as hyper as our current cat and we did not want to two terrors. Despite all of this I manages to sit down and pound out 5,000 words last night, with an ease that surprised me. I am still 1,000 words behind my desired goal, but I think I can make that up fairly quickly.
I am finding that when I know an entire progression, including the transitions from scene to scene, before I start writing, that when I do write I can write efficiently and with less energy. That means I need to spend more time up front, figuring out what I want to happen and how to get from one scene to the next, but it might be worth it (this is a note about how I would write without pressing deadlines).
If all goes well and I get my words in on time, I’ll be “done” next Sunday! I’ll still have many tens of thousands of words to finish my book, but I’ll have beat NaNoWriMo!