#7, not including complete rewrites of the same proposal, if you’re counting.
As noted in Jean’s weblog, we wrote straight through from shortly after 6 AM to 3:20 PM. I had an orange around six, then promptly forgot to eat anything else. I had one, just one, goal this morning. I wanted to get all the ideas Robin and Emily and I bounced off each other yesterday, on the Onyx proposal, down in finished form and out the door to Robin before she left for the weekend, so that if it passed muster, it could go out to Claire the first of next week.
I had this silly fantasy that I might be able to accomplish this in two hours, but I’d determined going in that, no matter how long it took, it would be done today.
It took nine hours, and I’m not talking about write, sit, chat, write hours. Jean ran the timer, and the majority of our conversation consisted of “3, 2, 1, go,” followed by ten minutes of hard writing. Then Jean would stop us, we’d tally up and post what we got, and off we’d go again. For NINE hours.
I completely rewrote the damn thing, from word one. Doubled its lengeth. Cut, redid, backed up, deleted, went again. Put together an entire 30-year timeline in my search for deeper villainy and unmitigated evil. Added new characters, compressed old characters. I have no way of knowing how many words I wrote today, because I threw so many away and redid them. Bare minimum (just counting added length) would be 2500. If I count the length of the proposal, 4500 or so. Honestly, I’d guess (including a several-thousand-word timeline, a quick character study on one character, additions, deletions, etc.) I probably had a seven-thousand word day.
Felt like, it, too. But I printed the proposal in hardcopy, proofed it, corrected some heinous errors, and sent a copy to Jean and a copy to Robin and Emily. And got it there in time.
I’ll get Jean’s suggestions either tomorrow or Sunday, and will have a day to figure out how to incorporate them before I talk to Robin on Tuesday. If she doesn’t have any additional suggestions, I’ll send her a final version. If she does, I’ll incorporate those, too. Either way, Claire should have a proposal by Wednesday.
I know I’d been shot down on a bunch of these now. But I have hopes. I think this one could be the one that goes.
Anyway, that’s why I didn’t post earlier. I was toasted. Fried. Crunchy. [Insert favorite synonym for ‘exhausted’ here.]
But I’m all better now, and tomorrow we’ll return to our regularly scheduled HAWKSPAR.
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