This is my 500th regular entry in Silent Bounce since Sept. 9th, 2004, which leads me to the realization that I’m damn chatty.
Nonetheless, this is a good one. (And would have been posted far earlier, had not my ISP decided that today was a good day to go tits up.)
I still feel wretched, but it doesn’t matter. Because I started my morning with math. Better than Wheaties by far.
I am at the mid-point on the first draft of HAWKSPAR, and, desperate at feeling like ground, roasted bat guano with a deadline still over my head, I decided to assess the damage.
I have 100,000 words yet to go.
I have 42 days, including today, to get them, and still keep my 25 revision days.
If I do 3000 words per day, I will have the first draft done in 33.3(ad nauseum) days. That means that between when I started this draft and today, I have written 8.7 days of breathing room into my schedule.
How did I do that? The same way you pay for a house, if you want to pay it off early or build up your equity. I threw a little onto the principle every installment. I never quit at just three thousand words. I always tossed in just a bit more.
So today I used some of the equity I worked so hard for. I took one of those days to do some desperately needed plot tuning on HAWKSPAR, as well as to work out essentials of the next proposal I’ll send to Claire. I didn’t write three thousand words. But, with the next scenes re-outlined and my confidence in the book honed and sharpened, those three thousand will come tomorrow, when, by God, I WILL be feeling better. (So long as I don’t get struck by lightning for exceeding my hubris quotient for the day.)
I’m going to return to my outlining and rethinking. Meanwhile, hope this 500th entry has given your something useful.
