Illness and Internet (13,165/Personal Update)

Image description:
Writer typing with expression that is a little.....TOO happy.

Progress Report 

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit- 12,785 (Last week 4232) [Just this week- 8553]
Slightly polished turd- 1470  (Last week 380)  [Just this week- 1110]

In case you're wondering, "slightly polished turd" is something I've done some revision on without necessarily starting a new draft (which will be absolutely necessary.....multiple times....before this process is over). A lot of my writing sessions don't start with me just sitting down and exploding in a flurry of words. Sometimes it's more like an old steam train trying to start going up a hill. I find that it helps me have some forward momentum if I go back a couple of pages and start by cleaning up what is already written. It helps me enter the scene and jump start the mindsets of the characters. There's no way in Apollo's left nipple that this counts as an actual "revision," but it reads a little cleaner than the raw stuff.

Just a quick personal update this week; today started with an extra three hours of kidlet wrangling so my Monday work schedule is 14 hours with the only real "break" being driving in rush hour from nannying in Oakland to Pleasant Hill where I teach. Mostly I've spent the week trying to catch up on sleep and feeling guilty that I was sleeping too much and not writing enough.

I began the week still fighting a cold and lost internet at my house for about 36 hours at the beginning of the weekend, so I've been feeling like I'm struggling against the universe pretty hard this week. Still, despite a rough start, I got a lot of writing done (as you can see) and each day is getting easier and easier to sit down and make more come.

Here comes the weekly didactic-a-thon though: notice that my word counts were higher than last week, but much lower than I would want them to be at a full clip. (Seriously, I need to at least double this, but triple would be better.) Writing this much is a hard-won habit, and it takes a lot of work to break through the inclination NOT to write. Even for me–a writer who blogs every day and makes about half my income from writing–I couldn't just sit down and start hammering out thousands of words a day like it was nothing. It takes some time to build up that level of discipline. Just like doing a couch to 5k...but with writing. (One of my strongest objections to Nano is that it's a lot like standing up and running a marathon without training–including the part where people collapse before they finish and injure themselves.)

Now to keep upping those word counts....