The road to hell and good intentions

[ksmith]

One week to go in the 70 Days of Sweat program, and, well, after all the bally-hoo...not much wordage to show. Was it a waste of time? No. I rethought the beginning of the wip several times, and think that now I have the makings of a decent opening in which something happens within the first few pages. Other plot drivers knocked on the door and made themselves at home, and I'm not sure I'd have thought of them if the guilt over lack of word production hadn't spurred me to thinking.

I hate to think that I require true panic in order to write. It doesn't bode well, it really doesn't. It also doesn't make sense. I cleaned off my desk yesterday, and uncovered a stack of magazine articles I had set aside for research. Local crimes. Industrial espionage. Gene therapy gone wrong. Maybe my interests fall into certain set categories, but they're my interests and I like them and working them into stories is the best thing in the world. And there are new stories there to be mined, but first I need to finish this one.

1 December. D-Day. That will be, I am afraid, the only date that will spur me onward. So, here it is.

Comments

[lmarley.livejournal.com]

But writing is simple, right? You just sit at the computer in your pj's and churn out deathless prose?

Or as one of the old sports writers said, "Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."

Sigh. I, too, struggle with a WIP. Fortunately, my goddess Connie Willis says she does the same thing, every day. I am comforted.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know. 23k is a pretty good number. Given that they're the first 23K of a book, I think those are always the hardest ones to get down. And it's comforting to see someone else wrestle with the "I'll do this," "Blast! That didn't work," conundrum. If you keep up such progress with each 70 day period between now and December, you'll be very close to done without the panic attack.

Adrianne

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I need to pick up the pace, though. Really really. Because I wanted to have the first draft done before Worldcon. That's about three months.

We're already headed for the halfway point of the year. OMGOMGOMG.