Oh, MAN. Today’s scene was fun, and I’m only halfway through it. It was hard, hard, painfully hard to stop…
But I’ve left myself in a great place to pick up on Monday. AND… for what it’s worth, I’ll hit 45,000 words and the half-way mark on the novel AND the five-book series next week.
As tempted as I was to keep writing, thinking that I could do that today if I wanted to… I’ve learned the hard way that the trick to being consistent on your writing is to know when to stop, and not just keep pushing past your objective.
When you do that, you start writing to failure.
WRITING TO FAILURE means that you keep expanding your word counts every day, pushing yourself harder and harder to do more than you did the day before, until you break. This is a self-inflicted form of writer’s block.
It’s mean, and I’ve done it before (a couple different times with commercial deadlines, in fact).
When you break, the words dry up, and you sit there staring at the screen, and you discover that by constantly punishing your creative brain, it has locked you out. Writing to failure is a great way to never finish the story, or the book… and a superb way to kill a writing career.
In any case, today I stopped when I ran a few words past my goal, and while it was fun, and while I’m excited to find out what happens on Monday when I come back to it.
ANYWAY…
While I was writing the scene today, a minor character from a previous book appeared suddenly, volunteering something that’s inside a big box he brought with him, because my MC helped him once — and because he liked the little personal gift my main character gave him when she did it.
And she has not opened his gift yet, so I don’t know what’s in it.
That’s cool. I’ll get to find out on Monday.
Now on to all the other stuff on the Friday list.
Have a wonderful weekend, and see you again next week.
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