Writing: 1,068 words
So I lied. I'm a writer. It's what we do.
I said I was going to take the weekend off as a little reward to myself for breaking the hundred-thousand word threshold. I really meant to do it. Hang out with the family at the beach house in Emerald Isle, catch up on some episodes of Haven and Warehouse 13, visit the newly installed World Trade Center beam in Havelock, maybe dismantle an uprooted 40-foot pine tree.
Well, I did all that (except for clearing out my backlog of Syfy shows). And I still wound up writing up every day, and hitting my thousand-word goal to boot. After spending Friday evening at Four Seasons East down off of Ocean Boulevard, my wife and daughter and I came back up to Havelock. We had meant to spend the night on the Bogue Banks, but the baby wasn't having it, and when you get right down to it, she's the one in charge. Mommy and Daddy may pay the bills, but Baby calls the shots. After everyone else had gone to bed, I spent three hours in the office writing 1,068 words in one-and-a-half sections to bring my total manuscript up to 101,069 words.
I also discovered the wonders of YouTube as a way of picking my own soundtrack when I write. I started out with Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" and Sara Bareilles's "King of Anything" and made my way down a long and curving highway that led through Dream Theater's "Anna Lee" and Queensrÿche's "I Am I" and Lethargy's "Lost in This Existence" and the entire tracklist of Avenged Sevenfold's latest album Nightmare. All I'm saying is that I could listen to "Stream of Consciouness" on an infinite cycle. Seriously. If you don't go into involuntary tachycardic palpitations at a minute and fifty seconds into "The Glass Prison," then you're probably already dead.
But I digress. I'm a writer. We do that too. I took off tonight, Monday night, the evening of the 12th, instead. I've got a Board meeting with the Pamlico County Arts Council this Thursday evening, and I've got a Treasurer's report for August to present, so I spent a couple of hours crunching the numbers and getting everything lined up on that financial front. And because I fumbled that responsibility a little bit last month, I also went back and put together a more comprehensive report for July as well.
I did briefly consider going back into a few of the sections that I'd written over the weekend and pruning some of the verbiage. The chapter is starting to run overlong at this point - Michael has been in Jersey for almost 19,000 words now, and probably won't head back west for another two or three thousand - and I can already think of one specific place to cut at least fourteen-hundred words. Part of me - the editorial part - thinks that if I feel like that material can so easily be cut, it ought to be cut. But at this point, my creative-mind has been driving the car for so long that it isn't willing to give up the keys.
And that's just fine with me. No editing. Not yet. I've been too productive lately to risk derailing my creative impulses. If it really is a problem, I'll fix it later.
I said I was going to take the weekend off as a little reward to myself for breaking the hundred-thousand word threshold. I really meant to do it. Hang out with the family at the beach house in Emerald Isle, catch up on some episodes of Haven and Warehouse 13, visit the newly installed World Trade Center beam in Havelock, maybe dismantle an uprooted 40-foot pine tree.
Well, I did all that (except for clearing out my backlog of Syfy shows). And I still wound up writing up every day, and hitting my thousand-word goal to boot. After spending Friday evening at Four Seasons East down off of Ocean Boulevard, my wife and daughter and I came back up to Havelock. We had meant to spend the night on the Bogue Banks, but the baby wasn't having it, and when you get right down to it, she's the one in charge. Mommy and Daddy may pay the bills, but Baby calls the shots. After everyone else had gone to bed, I spent three hours in the office writing 1,068 words in one-and-a-half sections to bring my total manuscript up to 101,069 words.
I also discovered the wonders of YouTube as a way of picking my own soundtrack when I write. I started out with Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" and Sara Bareilles's "King of Anything" and made my way down a long and curving highway that led through Dream Theater's "Anna Lee" and Queensrÿche's "I Am I" and Lethargy's "Lost in This Existence" and the entire tracklist of Avenged Sevenfold's latest album Nightmare. All I'm saying is that I could listen to "Stream of Consciouness" on an infinite cycle. Seriously. If you don't go into involuntary tachycardic palpitations at a minute and fifty seconds into "The Glass Prison," then you're probably already dead.
But I digress. I'm a writer. We do that too. I took off tonight, Monday night, the evening of the 12th, instead. I've got a Board meeting with the Pamlico County Arts Council this Thursday evening, and I've got a Treasurer's report for August to present, so I spent a couple of hours crunching the numbers and getting everything lined up on that financial front. And because I fumbled that responsibility a little bit last month, I also went back and put together a more comprehensive report for July as well.
I did briefly consider going back into a few of the sections that I'd written over the weekend and pruning some of the verbiage. The chapter is starting to run overlong at this point - Michael has been in Jersey for almost 19,000 words now, and probably won't head back west for another two or three thousand - and I can already think of one specific place to cut at least fourteen-hundred words. Part of me - the editorial part - thinks that if I feel like that material can so easily be cut, it ought to be cut. But at this point, my creative-mind has been driving the car for so long that it isn't willing to give up the keys.
And that's just fine with me. No editing. Not yet. I've been too productive lately to risk derailing my creative impulses. If it really is a problem, I'll fix it later.