Tag: KAK

Pinch Points: WTF Are They??

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is: Pinch Points or small turning points. We’re asking each other if we plan them, use them as foreshadowing, or just let the story flow?

So, I read KAK’s excellent post from yesterday explaining WTF “Pinch Points” are and how she uses them. Spoiler: yes, she plans them out.

Cannot possibly be a spoiler for anyone who knows anything about me: No, I plan them, I might use them?

YES, I LET THE STORY FLOW.

I swear, I need to start adding topics like “when you’re intuitively letting the story flow, how do you…. ” Except then I get stuck because there’s just not a whole hell of a lot to say about writing intuitively. Yep, here I am, letting things flow. Still flowing. How will it end? I have no idea!

LOL.

Amusingly enough, however, what KAK explained in her detailed analytical post is pretty much the exact scene I wrote yesterday in my current manuscript: ONEIRA.

(If you haven’t been following the podcast, ONEIRA is a Totally New Thing – new world, new magic system, unrelated to anything I’ve written so far. I’ve been calling it the book I’m not supposed to be writing – it fell on me from out of the sky and insisted on being written – but all of my friends have finally convinced me that clearly I am supposed to be writing it, so I’m trying not to say that anymore.)

It’s almost eerie, how the scene I wrote yesterday matches exactly what KAK says the pinch point with the villain is supposed to do. But I didn’t plan it at all. In fact, this scene introduced a new POV character and a new plot element, totally unexpected. But this is how I write and how I write this book in particular. It’s insisting on doing all sorts of things that I haven’t done before and don’t expect and I’ve just surrendered and am going with it. Which actually makes this project really fun, because I’m just letting it be whatever it is and not worrying about reader expectations or where it will fit in the marketplace.

All of this is to say that we all have our own process. My mantra: figure out what your process is and own it.

KAK loves to geek out on analysis, minutely controlling her stories down to pinches.

My stories just go their own way and I try to cling to the saddle.

It’s all good.

(Except sometimes I end up writing something I’m not supposed to be writing….)

Does Writing Faster Mean Cutting Out the Art?

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

001During my travels last week, I stayed with a friend of many years, Kristine Krantz (aka KAK). She blogs on the Word Whores with me and also writes fantasy. We met via the RWA online chapter FF&P, sometime back in the vicinity of 2009. We became critique partners and friends.

At that time, we were both in the same place – shopping these fantasy novels we’d written and hoped to sandwich into some pre-cut genre somewhere. Though my path was hardly a straight-line – no A-ticket Cinderella ride for me – mine has gone faster than hers. She’s still “pre-pubbed” or whatever euphemism you’d like to slap onto that vicious purgatory of waiting for the market to catch up to your genius. I know this is a hard place to be, because I’ve been there. Another friend and sister Word Whore, Allison Pang, who I met at the same time and in the same way, also shopping a like novel, did manage to pull the A-ticket and full Cinderella ride.

(The moral of our three paths, by the way, is that none is strewn with rose petals and nobody, so far as I know, has received a sparkle pony life companion.)

At any rate, (I’m sure by now KAK has scanned ahead to find out just what the hell I plan to say about her) KAK invited me to stay at her house while I attended the Lori Foster Reader & Author Get Together. This turned out to be an unexpected delight because we spent many hours on her delicious screened back porch, overlooking her park-like back yard, while we worked on writerly things and talked.

There’s something truly restorative about rambling conversations on writing and publishing with like-minded friend who’s as keenly interested in the minutiae as you are. Though we see each other on IM, the conversations only go so far. I also realized, as we talked, that I haven’t been updating her regularly on all of my “business.” It’s a funny thing – as you get into dealing with Published Author World, you tend to talk most to people in the same tangle. I don’t *think* I ditched my pre-pub buddy, but we’ve been working on really different things. And, as you faithful readers know, my life has been moving really fast lately.

In fact, she FINALLY (hee hee hee) completed a monstrous revision of her epic fantasy novel. “Revision” is probably a misnomer because she really wrote a whole new novel with the same world and characters. I feel quite a bit of guilty responsibility for this since I was the one to give the crit that triggered the massive rewrite.

She says she doesn’t blame me.

But it took her a long time to do this. Meanwhile I’ve been working fast. It’s nice for her to be able to do this, because she has the luxury of time right now. We know you pre-pub authors get sick of hearing this from us – we got sick of hearing it, too – but writing before contract is REALLY different than writing for contract and under deadline. We know it’s not nostalgia-worthy since being in that hem-tugging, please-see-me stage of publication wears on the soul, but having the luxury of time is something we look back on fondly. Also the lack of expectations.

KAK and I had this conversation. She mentioned that she’d noticed me blogging about writing books I sold on spec and how it feels different. I said, yes, that it feels like another kind of writing altogether. For me it means:

  1. I have to form a plan ahead of time, because selling on spec means I sell the concept and THEN write the book. This is not a natural pattern for me.
  2. Writing a story you’ve “pre-sold” to an editor creates this lens where I feel like I’m writing FOR the editor. That person is very firmly in my mind, because they are now the primary recipient of my story. I haven’t decided if this is good or bad.
  3. There is a firm external deadline. I have to plan ahead – by a year or more, in some cases – to ensure I have the time to write and revise the way I want to.

This last is crucial because, as I rambled on the topic, KAK nodded and said, yes, you write faster and cut out the art.

Which I’ve been mulling ever since.

Because I don’t think that’s true. I can totally see why it would seem that way. There is certainly not the time to lovingly tweak and polish every bit. There is, also, a definite sense of creating a product that fits a particular expectation (see #2 above). However, I don’t feel like I’m cutting out the art.

Maybe this is self-delusion, because I really HOPE I’m not cutting out the art.

I definitely have not managed to short-cut the suffering. Writing a book faster is no less painful than writing it slowly. It’s more that I am more efficient about it. Some of this is experience. I know by now where I’m going to bog down and how I’m going to feel about it – and I’m quite a bit more ruthless about pushing through it. I don’t have time to wander for weeks through the Enchanted Forest (see last Friday’s post, if you have no idea what I’m referring to). I’ve BEEN through that stinking forest and now I just take the direct – and sometimes arduous – path straight through to the Fountain of Story.

I think it’s less cutting out some of the art and more knowing how to pack the art in there. Like really experienced travelers can pack for a two-week trip in 30 minutes and not forget a thing. You just get good at it.

Mainly because you have to.

Speaking of which, I have a novella due on Saturday and just shy of 9K to go to finish.

See you on the flip side!

 

Having It Both Ways

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

A storm rolled in yesterday afternoon, producing rain, sleet (or hail – we weren’t sure) and then snow. I love all the looming shadows and the layers of cloud here.

I was IMing with one of my Critique Partners yesterday, about how I’m hitting this new place in my writing career. KAK (who just redesigned her blog AND actually posted to it here) is pre-published and is hitting the querying and submitting now. She was catching up with me on how Sapphire is doing, and I said it seems to be doing really well, though I make a point of not looking at sales rankings, etc. (With the glaring exception of that run on the Carina Press website, which I caught by surprise and then all the people who love me kept checking and telling me that I was still #1. That was pretty damn fun.) One way I knew was that my Carina editor, the insightful Deb Nemeth, emailed to ask if I was sending them more BDSM romance. Check that, she said “you are submitting more right?” and then said things about building readerships and frequency of publishing and so on and so forth and other things that I just don’t like to keep in my head for very long. KAK holds marketing stuff in her head much better than I do – one of the reasons I love her – and she said that Deb is right and that you need 3-4 books a year to build a readership. And I asked her if she wanted the email address for my boss at the day job.

Okay, I might have been whining a little bit.

Because she said, hey, you should be happy that editors are ASKING for your work. (I may have mentioned that my Ellora’s Cave editor, the lovely Grace Bradley, has been making similar noises.) I was chastened. I should be grateful. I *am* grateful.

The thing is, they ask what I’m working on and the novel I’m finishing is not one they’re asking for. So far, nobody is really asking for The Body Gift, either. So, I’m in this funny place where I have limited writing time and I’m spending it writing the books nobody is asking for instead of the ones they really want.

I’m insane, right?

I’ve seen career writers talk about this particular struggle – the work you want to write vs. the work they want to pay for. From that I know that this will never change. Charlaine Harris wrote the Sookie books way longer than she wanted to because of this. And you keep reminding yourself how tremendously lucky you are that they want to pay you to write more.

But then there’s that other reason we write. The love of it. “To touch the hem of the gown that is art itself” as Ann Patchett says. (Yes, I’m still reading that book. I went back, slowed way down and now I’m highlighting great lines to share here.)

I suspect the next step will be finding a way to do both.

Good Business – Please Don’t Be Difficult

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The longest day of the year comes to a close. The sun is now at its most northern point, shining into the Secret Garden. The pendulum hits the end of its arc, hesitates, and swings back.

So, I’ve been talking to people about redoing my website. Yeah, it’s old. I’ve bastardized it over the years. I *ahem* rarely update the thing. I kind of hate even looking at it and the prospect of dealing fills me with this formless sense of dread. Nevertheless: the site needs help and it’s time to do it.

Always an interesting thing, when you step out into the world with your fistful of money and say “hey, I’d like to purchase this service.” You’d think, especially with the economy as it’s been, that people would love to have your money and provide that service. Odd that it doesn’t exactly work that way.

I’m totally not counting all the people that suddenly followed me on Twitter the second I mentioned web design.

The first guy I talked to didn’t get my first email. Then, when he got my follow-up email, gave me a lot of complex feedback. As the astute Laura Bickle says, “I don’t want to know how sausage is made.” Don’t tell me about code, please. If I cared about that stuff, I’d be doing, um, web design. He charges by the hour, wasn’t sure how many hours it would take, and seemed to be going in directions that confused me. I expressed my confusion and he never replied.

Guess I was difficult.

After a week, I asked for other recommendations yesterday. KAK gave me one, and a Facebook friend gave me another. I filled out the form requesting proposals on both sites. One of those I still have not heard back from, which I wouldn’t think too much of, except that the other called me within about 1/2 hour. This gal chatted with me about what I wanted, didn’t treat me like I was crazy and explained in exact dollars what it would cost me and what I’d get for that.

THANK YOU.

Later in the day, the company owner emailed to tell me they were enthusiastic at the prospect of my business. She will be at RWA National next week and wants to meet with me. The fact that she runs her business this well makes me think that she will represent *my* business well, also.

My feeling of formless dread has transformed into enthusiastic hope.

Which is exactly what I’m hiring someone to do. Handle this for me, please.

I think it’s good to pay attention to how people handle their businesses, both good and bad. As writers, we are necessarily business owners, whether we want to be or not. More and more I think the key to running a good business is to make it easy for people to do business with you.

In short: Don’t Be Difficult.

I could wax on with specifics, but I’m sure you all know what I mean. Be easy to communicate with. Be clear. Know your price points.

Oh – and have a good website.

Ahem.

Village Fashion Assistance

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Why, yes, that is Katy Perry dressed in Gautier from the June 2011 issue of Vanity Fair. And there’s a very good reason she’s there for you to admire.

Let me tell you the story.

See, I’m going to the RWA National Conference the last week of June. This will be my fourth time. This year I knew I’d be invited to the Carina party, as one of their authors. Author cocktail party? Pretty much a slam dunk in fashion-planning department.

Now I had a bit of an additional complication, in that I discovered the Carina cocktail party would be right before the FFP Gathering. Not a big deal, right? One party to the next, stick to the same drink, all is fine, tra-la tra-lay.

Only there’s one little hitch: the FFP party is a Superhero theme and I have my heart set on being Cat Woman. I don’t think I’m ruining any surprises here by leaking that, especially since I fully expect to be far from the only Cat Woman at a Superhero party attended primarily by women. In fact, I figured I’d just go to the Carina party in my Cat Woman outfit. It’s pretty demure, since I’ll be more of a Michelle Pfeiffer version than the Halle Berry iteration since, hello, I do not have Halle Berry’s vicious body. Dress myself only in black leather straps? I don’t think so. My costume looks like this (sorry it’s so small) and I figured I could be brassy and just wear it to the cocktail party, too.

But, and this is a big “but,” then I was happily invited to the Harlequin party, too. I wasn’t expecting to, but since Carina is a Harlequin imprint, they included us questionable digital types. It’s after the FFP party, so that’s fine. And, hey, everyone says it’s THE party to go to, so woo hoo! Except, I get the invite and it’s a rooftop Black and White ball, formal dress.

I’ve got nothing.

Clearly I’m not wearing the Cat Woman outfit there. Even if it wasn’t an outfit that can’t be worn outside of air conditioning (lemme tell you, that thing does NOT breathe), it just ain’t formal, by any stretch. I look in my closet – nothing. You know what that means, right?

~FASHION EMERGENCY~

I’m going in a couple of weeks, have practically no time to shop, and no inspiration.

So, I’m getting my hair done – my carefully planned pre-conference beautifying appointment – flipping through Vanity Fair and whining about my fashion emergency to a sympathetic Larry. I get to the above Katy Perry pic and say, this! This is what I should wear. Larry peers over my shoulder. “That’s perfect,” he says, “that’s exactly what you should wear.”

I say, “Um, Larry, that outfit is Gautier and out of my league on so many levels it’s not funny.”

“Oh no,” he waves the scissors in the air, “you could totally fake this outfit.”

He outlines how I’ll do it. Do I have a black skirt I could slit up the front? As a matter of fact, I do. I have a black pleather pleated Jones New York skirt that would work. Put a white lace slip or skirt under it, black heels, black leggings – I love how he never once considers putting white stretch lace on my thighs – with a big white blouse on top, belted with a fabulous Santa Fe belt.

I’m sold.

Of course, this is not so easy as it sounds. (Did it even sound easy?)

Once I left the salon, clutching my pic of Katy Perry in *my* outfit, which Larry thoughtfully tore out of the magazine for me, I began to lose heart.

“Just find a little black dress,” my mother counsels. “You don’t have time for this.”

I went shopping Saturday morning and nothing, just nothing lit me up. I began to despair. Sunday I hit the consignment stores and Goodwill thinking I could cannibalize a wedding dress for the white lace underskirt. Big goose egg.

Then, in Dillards, of all places, I found a big white jacket – spunky, sheer and shimmery. It’s the last one, and I make the sales gal take it off the mannequin for me. It’s a large, turns out, but that works perfectly. I find some black leggings with black lace edging at Kohls. Already bought funky black heels for the Cat Woman look. I’m rolling now.

Back at home, I start Googling for wedding slips. KAK is helping me via IM. But even her Google-Fu, which is very strong, fails. She does, however, find me this fab black corset to wear under the white jacket.

Now we just need the lace skirt, which totally should not be this hard. But it is.

She’s combing eBay. Laura Bickle comes on IM and I catch her up on the Story So Far. Almost immediately, Laura finds this skirt on eBay. It’s perfect. It’s in Hong Kong.

BUT, they have express shipping and it’s not that much overall.

Win!

So, all the parts are acquired or on order. Yeah, we’ll see how it all works out.

I think it will be fabulous. I’ll try to post pics of the final product.

Could never have done this without my pals.

The More We Know

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I don’t mind the overnight snow, since we need the moisture. Dust storms have been clouding the valley. Even the daffodils don’t mind. They whispered that they’re built to withstand this kind of thing.

Over at Word Whores – my group blog, if you didn’t know – we’ve been talking this week about drafting styles. Whether you plan it all out ahead of time or discover as you go. Whatever terms you may assign to to those styles, writers seem to fall pretty solidly into one court or another.

On Laura Bickle’s post from yesterday, she talks about her plotting method. The comments conversation has become very interesting, as other writers profess horror or admiration for her detailed outlines.

That she does *before* she writes the book. Ahem.

At any rate, in the comments, the issue of revising came up. It’s long been the lore that the great drawback of not plotting ahead of time is that you spend a lot more time revising. KAK, who is a german dictator under all that red hair and those pretty smiles, declared that every scene must pass the “purpose” test. If it doesn’t serve the overall story, off it goes.

She’s ruthless. Believe me, I know.

I can see her point. And definitely the revising process is more cerebral than drafting for me. The drafting is all about the misting along and letting anyone and everything into the story. Revising brings the critical lens to the entire arc of the story. I’m not sure anyone can revise in a subconscious, misty way.

Except.

Okay, I’m a self-confessed sub-conscious, dreamthink, misty writer. I do believe the stories and characters exist in some reality and reveal themselves to me. I rarely feel like I “think” them up. Sometimes I can’t logically defend why someone or something is there. The critical lens would have me delete that stuff. The purpose test would demand excision. Goal, motivation, conflict? They scoff at these bits.

This is where my gut comes in. Neither the conscious, nor the subconscious, but the deep part that is most me. If I don’t trust that part, then I’m not me, for better or worse. The GMC stuff (see above) arises out of classic storytelling. People like to talk about archetypes of the hero’s journey and so forth. The thing is, archetypes, which Jung originally described as subconsciously shared concepts are something, by definition, already exist inside us. We can critically analyze them, but on some levels, they defy conscious definition.

No, I can’t always defend the purpose of a scene. Sometimes it’s because the scene is junk, or something I needed to write through to get somewhere. But one of the most surprising things I discovered over the ten years I spent writing and publishing essays – the things people keyed in on the most, were those things I had not planned. Scenes or images that just popped up when I was writing. Things that, sometimes, I nearly skipped writing, or thought about deleting later, because they seemed extraneous.

I keep reminding myself of that lesson.

March TBR Challenge

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Okay, I’m back from the memorial for my uncle. The celebration of life was well done and I enjoyed seeing the family. I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow.

And thank you for all the wonderful thoughts on the car wreck and those artifacts I picked up. I really appreciated the suggestion from several people that I contact the local police. I’ll do that today and let you all know if I found out anything.

For today though, I really want to get something up for the TBR Challenge 2011.

I totally signed up to participate in the challenge and here it is March already, with me having missed the first two months of the year, somehow. Has anyone seen January or February? They were here a minute ago…

At any rate, Wendy the Super Librarian, who is, not incidentally, also RWA’s Librarian of the Year, is hosting this year’s TBR Challenge. The idea is to pluck something out of your massive To-Be-Read (TBR) pile – yes, we know you have one. Don’t lie – that loosely fits the theme, read it and blog about it on the third Wednesday of the month.

This month’s theme? A new-to-you author.

So, Kate Elliott has been in my TBR pile for a long time. Spirit Gate and King’s Dragon have both languished in the paper pile since before we moved. That’s right – piled up with Eat, Pray, Love, which you all told me to go read to wash the movie from my head. I’ll get to it, okay?

That’s part of the point of this: to get to those books you’ve been meaning to read. KAK and I were just discussing yesterday how much less we read these days. I really want to devote more time to it. Getting on the TBR Challenge track is a great way to do it.

I also have about five pages of books waiting to be read in my Kindle. One of them is Kate’s Cold Magic. Yes – a third unread book of this particular author who everyone and their parrot tells me to read and I keep not getting to.

So, there I was, struggling through the newest book in a series by an author who shall remain unnamed. Suffice to say I used to love love love this series. The last one was meh and this one was so unrewarding that I felt depressed reading it. Halfway through the book, I deleted it from the Kindle.

This is the modern, though less dramatic, version of throwing the book across the room.

I fumed for a bit, thinking it’s me. I’ve lost my attention span. As one book blogger puts it, I lost my reading mojo. Maybe I just hate everything?

And, recalling the TBR challenge and that Kate Elliott is technically new to me, I opened Cold Magic.

Angels sang. Unicorns – yes, they were still dancing from before – capered madly.

You guys: This Is A Really Good Book.

I confess I’m only about 25% in. But immediately I felt in the hands of a master storyteller. I’m sinking into this world with the gratitude of a starving cat falling into a vat of tuna. It feels like forever since I couldn’t wait to get back to a book. It’s like discovering love all over again.

I would say more, but I have to finish my work so I can go read!

Ritual and Repetition

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On yesterday’s post about making writing sacred, Marcella commented that she was working on this and that she thought ritual and repetition were key.

Oh yes, yes, yes.

If we’re going to continue to use religious practice as a model, that is absolutely the method used worldwide to create sacred space. I think it’s useful to look to religious and spiritual practices because, regardless of your personal beliefs, they are the ways people approach raising themselves up, trying to be the best they can be.

Almost all spiritual pursuits rely heavily on ritual and repetition. Muslims pray five times a day, facing Mecca. Hasidic Jews have prayers for every moment of the day and less conservative branches of Judaism still use repetition, such as the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, or simply observing Sabbath every Friday evening. Catholic Mass has followed the same ritual for over a thousand years. Protestants attend services at the same time every week, following the same pattern. Buddhists meditate in certain ways at certain times. Even the less structured practices like Taoism incorporate repetition with arts like Tai Chi.

What ritual and repetition do is set the stage for what we’d like to have occur. Both spirituality and creativity come from a part of us that must be coaxed out and given a safe place to bloom. Whether you think of this as shutting down the left brain so the right brain can be heard, or quieting the conscious mind so the subconscious can operate, really doesn’t matter. What you’re doing is creating the practice, so the rest will follow.

Interestingly, the Hasidic Jews hold that it’s not necessary to believe. The Hasidics say you must practice. If you practice, belief will eventually follow, because practice creates faith.

What does this mean for the writer?

Yeah, I know you don’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear it either.

That’s right: write every day. Write at the same time every day, if you can. Set your rituals and follow them, ahem, religiously.

Maybe you’re more Hasidic and take your many times a day to write, just a bit. Or more like a Muslim, with carefully orchestrated sessions throughout the day. Maybe you’re more Catholic, like me, and observe the practice in one long session every morning.

Regardless, if you want to create a sacred space for writing, this is the way to do it.

Believe me, I know how hard this is. I know most of our lives do not accommodate any kind of daily ritual, especially one that requires peace and silencing of all the tumult.

That’s where the sacrifice comes in. KAK said yesterday that she pictures me like a Valkyrie, destroying anything that threatens the sacred space. It’s a good analogy because I am that fierce about it. I think we have to be. If we aren’t, before you know it, the temple is full of merchants and money-lenders and there’s no room for anything else.

I always liked the line from Jesus Christ Superstar: “A temple should be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.”

If there are thieves in your temple, then yes, kick them all out.

Find your ritual and repeat as necessary.

LEEzard

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A new sighting on the wildlife camera! The rare literary lava iguana, also known as a LEEZard.

Yeah, okay, it’s a running joke.

The difficult thing about inside jokes is, they evolve over time and are thus difficult to explain to those who weren’t part of the (often punchy) process. And then, when you do explain, it’s usually not funny anyway.

But I’ll try. Because *I* think it’s funny.

It started when I first moved to Santa Fe a year ago. David got a night-vision camera and set it up to see what all wildlife was coming up on our porch at night. I was messing with him by putting up my little purple iguana beanie doll that Val brought me from Australia in front of the camera as a “sighting.” I thought I was SUPER DUPER funny and he erased the picture. I blogged about it, of course.

At this same time, I was spending morning writing time in the FFP water cooler – an online chat room where we gather to write. We write for an hour or half-hour and check in to compare word counts, cheer or commiserate. In this odd pattern, my internet would tank regularly sometime around 9 am, every damn morning, kicking me out of the chatroom. My critique partner KAK speculated that it was the lizard.

Really – it got to be very funny.

But it all peaked one night when KAK and I were IMing feedback to each other about our current novels. I told her I didn’t care if her heroine did have lizard-like scales, the biologist in me didn’t buy that she could swim in lava and not be affected. It turned out that she wasn’t lizardy at all, but more feline and I’d completely misinterpreted the descriptions. KAK accused me of lizard bias. I pointed out that felines were even LESS likely to survive a lava-swim. She told me I needed to tell the reader how to pronounce some of my bizarre words, which I find it awkward to do without breaking that fourth wall.

Hey reader! You pronounce it like this! You see my point?

But just then I saw an excerpt from someone’s published novel where the hero, Gunnar, tells the heroine, in his husky bedroom voice as he stalks towards her, gleaming and naked, “you pronounce it GOOnar.”

I know, right?

Oh, GOOnar, take me!

I shared, KAK started in on LEEzards… it was silly and punchy and might not be funny to you at all.

But she sent me a LEEzard for my recent birthday. It’s been out, running around and chewing up the internet lines.

Thanks KAK!

Write Fatgirl Write!

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So, I might have overtrained.

Yesterday I crashed a bit. I could tell when I started that I wasn’t up to par. Some days I can just feel it, that the words aren’t going to flow.

I don’t want it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, so I make myself write anyway. But I’m not sure that’s best.

For some reason, Tuesdays are often like that for me. I’m kind of considering taking Tuesdays off from writing, if they’re all going to turn out like that.

I didn’t make my 1.85 K. I wrote 1270 new words and deleted a whole bunch of stuff. Frogging again. I kind of hit a blind pocket in the story and, in brainstorming with KAK, realized I had to go back and redirect an earlier scene, which meant deleting an entire scene that now never occurs.

The upshot is I ended up 200 words down. Alas.

Now I have to stop there and acknowledge that writing 1270 new words is really good. A step up from my 1K. So not bad for a “bad” day.

Elizabeth Ryann asked me in the comments yesterday if it helps that I have a definite time to stop writing, because I switch to the day job and I cavalierly said yes. Which is true, it normally does.

However, yesterday was such a grueling day with so little accomplished, that I had Sterling up on my personal laptop for most of the day, trying to add a little more when time allowed, trying to hit that finish line.

Finally I realized I was doing the equivalent of Simon Pegg in Run Fatboy Run, dragging myself along in the middle of the night, long after the marathon has ended.

There’s something to be said for pushing yourself, for holding yourself accountable to meet the goal. But there’s also a time to realize that you’re only exhausting yourself.

And likely only putting down words that will have to be deleted anyway.

So, I’m still going for my 1.85K each day. But I’m holding myself to my stop time. If I’m feeling it and I need to, I might do another hour or so at the end of the day.

Feel the burn!