Roasting S’mores

Camp is still going on of course, and I think it’s time to break out the s’mores ingredients. We all deserve a reward after three weeks. Finding a fire shouldn’t be too difficult. I’m fairly sure my keyboard will serve that purpose at this time. Other than a slight hiccup Friday night, yes, things have been going that well. And I have a surprise. Well, it’s a surprise to me at least. The rest of you probably won’t be. That seems to be the pattern around here.

As I said, writing has proceeded very well with What Lies beneath. I had another 10k day yesterday, my second for this book. That kind of floors me, given it wasn’t that long ago that I was topping out around 6 or 7k in a full day. The funny thing is, I probably could have gone another couple of sprints, but it felt like a good place to stop and think.

I kind of need that anyway. I need to finish the chapter I’m on, which is an important one for Viz. After that though, I’m into the climax, both for Reah and for the book. I didn’t want to write that with only a couple of brain cells still firing. I’m fairly sure you guys can understand that. Besides, I’ve been looking forward to this bit since I started writing the book. I want to be all the way present for it. 😀

I mentioned a little hiccup on Friday, so let me explain. Normally Friday’s a pretty good day for me for writing. I’m jazzed about it being the weekend, plus the big #writeclub goes on that day and it’s hard not to feel energized around that many writers all driving for more words. That’s part of why I love sprinting with others on Twitter, not just on Fridays. However, this past Friday, I was feeling a bit… wonky. Seriously, I think I’ve got a cold (no surprise, as there’s always something floating around the office at my day job), but on Friday it had delusions of grandeur. I couldn’t think straight for most of the night. I tried, I really did, but when it takes me an hour to manage a couple hundred words, three to get to a thousand and then I realize it was all a rabbit hole to begin with, well, then it’s time to admit defeat. I gave myself a break for a few hours, watched a movie and generally rested.

Yes, I did have to work at not feeling guilty that I wasn’t writing. There were a number of factors in that guilt, and my neurotic need to push as hard as I can every single day is only one of them. Mostly it was just that I wanted to be writing. I really did. I love Reah and Viz. I love the way their stories are coming out, even if Reah’s reset of the whole thing makes books 2 and 3 very murky at present. I know they’re still there. I’m just mostly in the dark about content. Oh well. But the point is that I love writing their story and I wanted to be doing that. Only sometimes you’re better to back it off and let it rest or you’ll just do more work that you have to throw out.

I did manage to get some done in the last few hours of the night on Friday, after I junked the rabbit hole crap. I contented myself with my minimum for any writing day, a touch over 2k. Part of me still wants to put it the stuff from the detour in, but it doesn’t fit, I don’t think, not yet. That I still want to include it suggests to me that it may have a place in book 2. We’ll see how I feel when it’s time to build that book though. One thing at a time. I still need to finish this book.

The good news is that I’m almost there. I’m surprised to have come to this point already, given my extrapolations on length for this book in the early days. But then, it wouldn’t be me writing a book if I didn’t start out navel-gazing about how long it would be only to find it ending up shorter, right? You’d think I would have learned by now. WLB is already the longest book I have written at 123.327 words. That said, I do not have anything like 70k words left to write. There isn’t that much story left. So yay, no having to edit a 200k novel. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

Honestly, I think I have about 15k to go, or something in that vicinity. I have some hopes of getting upwards of half that done today, if it goes well, and I think it will. Reah and Viz seem to want their story told as much as I want to tell it. Now that’s a good author-character relationship. 🙂 I just can’t believe I’m at this point after only three weeks. I mean, I know the words add up and all that, but having written easily 125k words in three weeks is kind of insane, even by my standards. It does explain why the Camp NaNo tracker says my average words per day is 6166 though. Um, wow.

Anyway, there’s your update and now I’m off to hit the trenches. The end of this book won’t write itself. I’m kind of glad about that. I’m having too much fun doing it myself.