This post is procrastination. I am now writing about writing instead of just writing my novel. This is opposed to my last novel, which turned out in the end to actually be about writing a novel, and to my recent Four-Hour Comic which was entirely about the creation of itself. The novel I’m not writing about as I write this is about dragons… sort of.
Anyway, according to my rough estimate, I’m about 33,500 words into the thing. I say rough estimate because I’m still only writing “new” stuff for it on the Smith-Corona, and I haven’t typed in any of it into the computer since around 10,771 words. The computer does an accurate, actual word count, the word count above is based on page count times average words per page. Which also gives me a goal. Not just 16,500 more words by this time next week, but 24 (double-sided, double-spaced) manually typed pages… more if I end up doing a lot of quick dialog with short lines… but the rest of the book should be a lot of action and a lot of long, long lines of dialog as our hero (Larry) tries to convince the dragons to stop massacre-ing every man, woman, and child in America. Philosophically. Yep.
Anyway. 24 pages to go. No problem, that’s something I can see in front of me, feel in my hands, and really get a grip on. Not like the nebulous “16,500 words” which … who knows how long THAT is? No, 24 pages is nice. That’s 3 or 4 pages a day, if I spread it out, which is easy-peasy, considering I wrote … well, it’s just about 8 such pages already today.
I’m going to take a break tonight, watch a movie, try to relax, try to work out the details of the next section in my head a little… Maybe write a page or six after the movie… or just go to bed… Anyway, I’ve made up most of the difference I lost at the beginning of the month, and I’m well on my way. Moo.
