Paksworld

Fifty thousand words on the new book, that’s what.   The wordage rolled over this afternoon.

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What?! I hear you cry.  What do new chairs have to do with writing the book?

It’s one of the mysteries of the creative mind.   Suffice to say that throughout our entire marriage (over 41 years now) we have never had “real” kitchen chairs.    And now we do, replacing mismatched, aging, and uncomfortable folding chairs with real wood chairs that are up to our weights and sizes.   Library chairs, in fact.

New chairs with new tablecloth & trial chair pad

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Writers with what I call Engineer Mind have perfectly organized desks and files.   I’ve met a few of those.   I’m not one.  I have what I call Writer Mind (in lieu of calling it Chaos Mind.)    All my organizational skill goes into the writing…none is left over for anything else.

This becomes even more obvious when I’m faced with competing demands on organizational ability.

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Terie Garrison’s bright idea of a one-month “race” to keep us motivated in the otherwise uninspiring month of February…she and I did this last summer (August can also be One of Those Months).

You can watch progress at her LiveJournal–she’s got the graphics up at the head of her journal,   and because we’re each reporting in our own time zones, the graphic may be a day behind.   ( It is, as I post this. )    The up-to-the-minute wordage posts are on Terie’s newsgroup at SFF.net.   To read there, if you’re not a member (at least several of the contestants are), go to http://webnews.sff.net/ and sign in as a guest.   You’ll browse to find her newsgroup:   sff.people.terie-garrison.

The idea is that each writer chooses a word goal for the month–large or small, doesn’t matter.  Those picking the longest goal have no multiplier–the words you see are the real words reported.  Those with shorter goals have a multiplier to compensate for the “long” goal.

Or, why you always want some slack in your writing schedule.   As in,  colder weather than we’ve had for at least 10 years, in terms of both hours below freezing and how low it goes (both plain temp and wind chill),  in a house designed for a hot climate.   As in, husband sick and unable to help with the outside stuff like feeding horses, mucking out,  helping with blanketing horses, checking outside faucets to be sure they’re dripping, chopping ice in the horse trough,  going to the bank, feed store, and post office,  hauling hay from the stack to the barn, hauling horse feed from the car to the barn, etc., etc.    As in,  the need to check indoor faucets as well, to keep the house pipes from freezing up.    Oh, and connectivity issues and power outages.  And the first signs that whatever he’s got, I might be coming down with.  Do. Not. Want.

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Elizabeth called just now. They’ve lost power, so she’ll be offline until it’s restored.