![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
more tedious bean-counting
Jul. 1st, 2007 02:10 amThis is another of those peeks inside my head, and the way I deal with quotas and goals while noveling.
( Warning: OCD number-crunching within. )
Here's the crappy thing about it, and about this novel-writing business in general. I wrote 1K or more for twenty-nine days this month; on June 10th I was having difficulties, and I only managed 518. Thirty straight days of being a Good Little Writer.
Now I just have to keep it up for another two months, and I'll be done.
There really aren't any days off for good behavior. Even when you aren't under a deadline, it's generally important to write every day, not just for reasons of craft and discipline and story flow, but because you'll never bloody finish if you don't. And when you're under a deadline, even the notion of doing things like taking weekends off rapidly stops being feasible. I'm not even in a particularly bad situation, here; I know plenty of writers under more pressing deadlines, or who have to mail one book off to a publisher and immediately dive into the next. (There's in fact a minor game of one-upsmanship underway on a mailing list I'm on: whose deadline has the bigger, nastier fangs?) The only reason this doesn't suck like a mighty Dyson vaccuum is because we like what we're doing, but still -- there are times when I wish the phrase "work week" meant anything to me.
But no rest for the wicked. Sleep, perhaps -- I will go to bed once I post this -- but no rest. Because tomorrow I have to get up and do it all again.
( Warning: OCD number-crunching within. )
Here's the crappy thing about it, and about this novel-writing business in general. I wrote 1K or more for twenty-nine days this month; on June 10th I was having difficulties, and I only managed 518. Thirty straight days of being a Good Little Writer.
Now I just have to keep it up for another two months, and I'll be done.
There really aren't any days off for good behavior. Even when you aren't under a deadline, it's generally important to write every day, not just for reasons of craft and discipline and story flow, but because you'll never bloody finish if you don't. And when you're under a deadline, even the notion of doing things like taking weekends off rapidly stops being feasible. I'm not even in a particularly bad situation, here; I know plenty of writers under more pressing deadlines, or who have to mail one book off to a publisher and immediately dive into the next. (There's in fact a minor game of one-upsmanship underway on a mailing list I'm on: whose deadline has the bigger, nastier fangs?) The only reason this doesn't suck like a mighty Dyson vaccuum is because we like what we're doing, but still -- there are times when I wish the phrase "work week" meant anything to me.
But no rest for the wicked. Sleep, perhaps -- I will go to bed once I post this -- but no rest. Because tomorrow I have to get up and do it all again.
