Saturday, November 25, 2006

Writing This Week

Last night I sat down and figured out how much I have to write every day between now and Christmas in order to get the book done. It came out to 800 words. So I set myself a reasonable target for the remaining days of this week, and then the New Regime begins: 800 words per day, no matter what. That means finding the discipline that has so far evaded me in this novel, to actually write in the evening and late at night, if I don't hit my target in the morning. That's been the main reason I haven't finished the book yet: school started up in September, my wife started working in a church on Sunday mornings, and I could no longer write every morning. But I didn't make up the time later in the day. So now I have to do that, always.

Yesterday morning I had written almost 400 words. So I figured out I had to write 800 words a day, and then I proceeded to write 800 more words last night. Then at Starbucks this morning I managed to crank out almost 1,400. I'm blowing my target out of the water. So I came home from Starbucks this morning and announced, "I think I need to resubscribe to World of Warcraft, in order to have a way to reward myself for days like today." It's been kind of a running joke at my office that I needed to restart my subscription if I wanted to get this novel finished, because it was such an effective motivator for the last book.

Well, today I finally did it. What's more, I set my son up with a guest pass, so we played together. Quite a lot, today, actually: we started new characters and got up to 7th level. He had so much fun, and it rekindled a lot of my early excitement about the game. Good father-son bonding.

More milestones: last night I broke 80,000 words, and this morning I passed page 200 in my Word document.

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
81,904 / 120,000
(68.3%)

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