Paksworld

This week wasn’t as productive as the week before, due to Things.    However, other than two of the Things (neither of which produced any balancing good result), Things got done that needed doing.  (Not all, by any means.)

10,020 words for the five-day work week despite one day of <300 words.   22,054 for the month of August up to this moment.   Need another 20,000 by the end of the month (before Dragon*Con, that is.)

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2700 words today.

That’s really brief, but it’s really late.

The first new song of the new group of books popped up after choir tonight.   Now I need to write the music for it.

2641 words today, not bad for a Monday.   Especially a Monday that included a visit to a friend whose mother died over the weekend, a trip to the town 20 miles away to get some much-needed immunizations (tetanus was way overdue),  some more set-up work on a computer (changing one suite of software for another–always SUCH fun.)   And baking additional bread (but not making the dough today–thawing out the lumps of frozen dough from yesterday, because the larger loaf from yesterday went to the friend whose mother had died, along with a couple of quarts of homemade soup.)

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It’s been an interesting week in the writer-as-worker world.   I did in fact meet and even exceed my weekly quota, topping 2000 words/day and ending up with a total for the five days of just over 12,000 words.  Two of the days produced really good stuff.   Three of the days produced more pedestrian stuff, but enough forward motion through the plot that there’s something to work with in revision.  Two of the days (including one that turned out very well in the end, and one that turned out OK in the end) were very, very difficult…to get started, to continue, to drag out the task to the end of the day (which was late.)

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Some Mondays feel more like the working writer than others.  This past weekend, I deliberately took both Saturday and Sunday off from the book.  I hoped this would generate some pressure from the book to start of the week, and  I had plenty of other things to do.

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When you’re writing a book that covers various seasons, you’re often writing out of season.  It’s Texas in late July, and today I was writing about a Midwinter celebration somewhere in Lyonya.   The Midwinter Feast I wrote about in Fin Panir, when Paks was there, about to become a paladin candidate, or the one that Gird’s followers had all alone in that winter camp,  had covered, I thought, the ground of what Midwinter celebrations were like, and I had not expected any big surprises.

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In case anyone has time to hunt for this…did I give the Clart Company commander a name anywhere in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter?   And did I mention whether the Clart commander died?

In the meantime, another 2500 words.

So…page proofs are done (check) and some family LifeStuff probably/maybe resolved (half-check) and I’m back “on book”.   Yesterday, after a dietary error that kept me close to one room in the house, turned out to be a very productive writing day anyway (3001 new words, in addition to cleaning up some continuity problems I discovered while working on the proofs of Kings…no, B- did not tell his father about hmmmmmph at Autumn Court, becuase hmmmmph didn’t start until AFTER Autumn Court. when ummmm went mmmmph.  Yes, hate me.)

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There’s nothing like actually turning off everything else and convincing the distractable mind that no, it cannot do anything until it’s produced the day’s wordage.  No, we are not playing Solitaire.  No, we are not reading email.  No, we are not checking Twitter, or LJ, or the SFF.net newsgroup.   The television is off limits.   The new red shiny netbook is off limits.   The outdoors is off limits.   Cooking is off limits.  (Dishwashing isn’t.)    The piano is off limits.  This chair, this keyboard, this one file.  First.

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