Thursday, September 10, 2009

Feeling Stoked

Not only am I still right on target with my daily word counts, I also sat today and wrote up Saturday's Vault in advance. That never happens. Usually I'm scrambling around on Saturday scanning and cleaning up and resizing and writing. Sometimes when I get to Saturday, I don't even know what book I'm covering yet.

So to have it all done and published and ready to post automatically by Wednesday is a luxury. I don't know if I'll end up doing extra writing with the extra time on Saturday, or just using the time to do something else, maybe something I never take the time to do.

But reality check: last time I tried a NaNoWriMo-style writing pace, I was able to keep on pace for two weeks before bombing out and finishing the month with 28,500 instead of 50,000. But I had several different circumstances. I was employed. I was still living with my wife, with all the extra responsibilities that entails. I bought myself City of Heroes as a birthday present and got sucked into that massive MMORPG time sink.

And perhaps most of all, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to exceed the word goals, because I wanted to have a marketable novel that was more than 50,000 words. And I was putting extra pressure on myself, because I was writing something that I had been contemplating for something like 15 years. It had a large cast, and a complex plot (at least, it had several tracks of action going simultaneously).

Now, I'm not really pressuring myself much. The length I'm looking for is exactly 50,000 words. The novel is a new idea, and a simple one, straightforward. I'm not trying to redefine a genre or transcend it, just sit comfortably in it with a vivid story and some interesting characters.

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