Intersection Logs

Need to write faster! Or procrastinate less, or something. This week's plan was to write 1000 words a day, to make up for last week's delinquency, but what I actually got was two 1000-word days, a three-day hiatus, a 2000-word day, and today when I squeezed out a bit under 1000 just to keep the daily average at 500/day for the year so far.

I'm starting to wonder if that target may be on the low side, though. We shall see; I don't think this is going to triple on me like the Zeno's fanfics of last year, but time will tell.

Perhaps if I catch myself adding too much filler I shall have to go write something else instead for a while.

I have no idea how many words I wrote today. Somewhere between 500 and 700, I think, but between the bits that had to be trimmed in grafting last night's output back into the parent file, and the platform shifts and the embedding new sentences in old paragraphs ... I don't know. At least I think I know how to get Tam and baby Jorik lost in hyperspace and why, now. I also need to remember that Claris is claustrophobic and rework the jail-cell and trapdoor scenes with that in mind.

(Just for my own reference, the Sept 8 version of the 6-10 file is 8412 words, and now it stands at 9348.)

It occurs to me that the last time I wrote a whole novel I was working on a 386 with about 3Mb of RAM, and I didn't have much choice but to do a file per chapter. (This was much more convenient than the way I wrote my PhD thesis, which had two or three files per chapter.) Then I wrote a (small) bunch of things in the 10-40K word range, as single files without chapter breaks. Writing in chapters but keeping all the chapters in one file just feels wrong, and for the convenience of the Palm -- which is probably more powerful in most ways than the Pentium laptop that succeeded the 386 -- I started a new file after the first five chapters. Unfortunately, that just makes the wordcounting fiddlier, and I may end up sticking it back together. The Palm can hold a whole novel at once easily enough, but navigating it gets a bit tiresome.

I'm bowing out of the second round of thing_in_150, at least for now. I wasn't really ready to start again at the beginning of August and I haven't been able to get back into the rhythm since, and now, between work commitments and falling into what looks like a major plot hole, I just can't keep it up. This doesn't mean I'm giving up on writing again; it just means that I need to do it at my own pace for a while.


The good news is that this probably means more reading and more interesting content here.

I am now in possession of a card to operate the apartment-complex gates on the occasional occasions when I get a ride home and arrive after 7pm. (The gates will be switched on next Monday.) Unfortunately, when I put the card in the front pocket of my waist pouch it seemed to interfere with the one that opens the outer doors at work, but moving it further back fixed that. My favorite pedestrian hole-in-the-hedge still exists, though it's a bit overgrown at this time of year, and I have an elegant red scratch on my left shin to prove it.


I wrote 1540 words tonight. If I can keep that up for a week, I can make up for missing two of the first three weeks of the second round of thing_in_150, but I'm not sure that's doable.

And thing_in_150 is over, at least the first round.

Behemoth 47 is at 31,117 words, and I'm at the point where I wonder whatever gave me the idea I could write, let alone write novels. (I couldn't characterize my way out of a wet paper bag, and whatever voice I once had has disappeared into a morass of cliches, that kind of thing.) The story's at an interesting enough place that I'm not really tempted to give up, though.

That's the first four chapters, which suggests to me that I may be (surprise!) underestimating that target wordcount. Still managing to keep up 3500+ words per week, but taking a couple of days off now and then, which seems to be a manageable pattern for current conditions and the current novel. Protagonist has now had a chance to confront Love Interest, who is being charming and somewhat evasive. I'm somewhat worried about whether his motivation is sufficiently sympathetic to make him worthy of her. Also, I may need to go back and slip in a few pointers to what their joint interest is.

Protagonist continues to learn about her environment. Sooner rather than later, she's going to have a long talk with the young man who got her into this. That will probably be much harder to write than today's bit was.