Writing: 1,036 words
I have at last outsmarted my own long-held tenet of nulla felix mediocritas.
On Saturday morning, the wife and the baby and I headed down to the beach house on Emerald Isle to spend the day with the Jersey family. The baby decided she didn't want to sleep in an unfamiliar house, and she only relented when I agreed to take a nap with her. So that worked out well. Except that my arms kept alternately falling asleep, and I felt like I had a thirty-pound stone sitting on my chest.
But she slept for two hours and woke up happy, so I call it a fair trade. Of course, she woke me up by poking me in the nose and cheeks, because my face is apparently fascinating to children. And Mommy wound up taking Baby down to the beach for a couple of hours later in the day, so I got to catch a two-hour of my own, and that's always nice. We finally made our way back up to Havelock by seven.
After everyone else had gone to bed, I sequestered myself in the office and wrote another 1,036 words in another one-and-a-half sections to bring the total manuscript up to 102,105 words. I won't lie: that still feels pretty awesome to say. I wound up staying up far later than I wanted to once again, but in the process I also discovered a way to fulfill my goal of writing a thousand words per day while also getting to bed at a respectable time every now and then.
I realized that I have never written only a thousand words. Only seven times in the last four weeks have I written fewer than eleven-hundred words, and ten times, I've written more than twelve-hundred words. So I crunched a few numbers with my trusty Excel spreadsheet, and came up with what I think of as the Word Bank. I added up all of my overages - the words that exceed my nightly thousand-word goal - and discovered that, say, by the night of September 5th, when I took the night off from writing new story to edit "Finnegan's First Time," I had banked 3,924 words.
So here's my new pellet system. For every thousand words I bank over my regular thousand-word quota, I can take a night off. I don't have to, but I can allow myself to without feeling like I'm giving in to my lazy Libran tendencies. On the 5th, for instance, I used 1,029 banked words, which brought the Word Bank down to a balance of 2,895. Of course, I wrote 1,105 words on the 6th, banking 105 to bring that balance up to an even 3,000 words. Obviously, banked words do not increase my total manuscript wordcount.
They just earn me vacation time.
On Saturday morning, the wife and the baby and I headed down to the beach house on Emerald Isle to spend the day with the Jersey family. The baby decided she didn't want to sleep in an unfamiliar house, and she only relented when I agreed to take a nap with her. So that worked out well. Except that my arms kept alternately falling asleep, and I felt like I had a thirty-pound stone sitting on my chest.
But she slept for two hours and woke up happy, so I call it a fair trade. Of course, she woke me up by poking me in the nose and cheeks, because my face is apparently fascinating to children. And Mommy wound up taking Baby down to the beach for a couple of hours later in the day, so I got to catch a two-hour of my own, and that's always nice. We finally made our way back up to Havelock by seven.
After everyone else had gone to bed, I sequestered myself in the office and wrote another 1,036 words in another one-and-a-half sections to bring the total manuscript up to 102,105 words. I won't lie: that still feels pretty awesome to say. I wound up staying up far later than I wanted to once again, but in the process I also discovered a way to fulfill my goal of writing a thousand words per day while also getting to bed at a respectable time every now and then.
I realized that I have never written only a thousand words. Only seven times in the last four weeks have I written fewer than eleven-hundred words, and ten times, I've written more than twelve-hundred words. So I crunched a few numbers with my trusty Excel spreadsheet, and came up with what I think of as the Word Bank. I added up all of my overages - the words that exceed my nightly thousand-word goal - and discovered that, say, by the night of September 5th, when I took the night off from writing new story to edit "Finnegan's First Time," I had banked 3,924 words.
So here's my new pellet system. For every thousand words I bank over my regular thousand-word quota, I can take a night off. I don't have to, but I can allow myself to without feeling like I'm giving in to my lazy Libran tendencies. On the 5th, for instance, I used 1,029 banked words, which brought the Word Bank down to a balance of 2,895. Of course, I wrote 1,105 words on the 6th, banking 105 to bring that balance up to an even 3,000 words. Obviously, banked words do not increase my total manuscript wordcount.
They just earn me vacation time.