Clarion Write-a-thon Week 1 - the first 5000
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
Fountain of Love, or Fountain of Hate? Yes this is relevant to my novel.
Miraculously, I wrote exactly 5000 words of fiction this week. Well, not exactly miraculously, of course. It did require hard work and effort, and there were no magic wands involved.
But this, the first week of the Clarion Write-a-thon was going to be the hard one, because it overlapped with one of my two fortnights a year of actual paid-outside-the-house work (exam supervisions at the university). And that was before I had to juggle my whole work, already bursting at the seams with childminding favours, to incorporate an allnighter in Emergency with my Dad (who is now fine) and several days of dealing with the practical fallout of that.
So, yes. I wrote 5000 words because I’m bloody good, really. (I am often asked how I get my writing done while managing a family and I NEVER say it’s because I’m bloody good - maybe I should)
The supervisions I’ve been doing for most of this fortnight involve either scribing (where I physically write the exam for a dictating student) or managing small rooms of between 3-8 students either on computers or in smaller rooms because of special needs. Apart from the scribing exams where I’m busy the whole time, most of my work involves a lot of set up at the beginning, lots of stuff at the end, and several long hours in between where I need to be present and alert, but can read a book or check my email as long as I look up regularly. For most of this fortnight I have used the time to get through some of my To Read list, and still working on my read-three-for-every-book-I-buy system, I have almost managed to catch up from my many Continuum book purchases.
But this week it occurred to me that really, given that the Clarion Write-a-thon had started, and I had promised myself 30,000 words in 6 weeks, I should be writing. It occurred to me after I had already covered the only spare sheet of paper at the desk in tiny writing, on both sides. The next day, I bought a notebook.
I haven’t done that in years. I spend most of my creative time at home, with my laptop, and never draft anything long hand except occasional story notes. But I had been reading Stan Lee’s How To Write Comics and there are like two pages devoted to the importance of carrying a notebook (something I did obsessively in my teens, there are several huge plastic tubs of notebooks full of precious teenage words somewhere in my house, there’s a reason my daughters can’t use their wardrobes) and it made me feel all nostalgic.
Due to family complications and said Emergency visit, I missed one exam shift on Tuesday, but managed to get to work on Wednesday afternoon. And when I wasn’t dealing with the students, I wrote. A couple of pages of a children’s book I’ve been trying to get to for ages, but keep making false starts on. And then several scenes of my YA steampunk fairies and robots novel. That night, I went home and typed up some of those pages. Once I hit the day’s wordcount (1000ish) I stopped. I typed more the next day, and the next. Changing some of the words, but mostly just entering the text I’d already written.
I did the last typing on Friday, ran out of words in the notebook, and realised that between the original 2 pages I had scrawled in Monday’s exam, and the notebook pages from Wednesday afternoon, I had written exactly 5000 words. That to me is a stonking great sign that THE WORK METHOD, IT CURRENTLY FUNCTIONS.
No more exams for me (well one more but it’s a scribing one so no writing time for me) but I rather think that for this particular 6 week writing stretch, I might have to be utilising the notebook-to-laptop technique more extensively. New toy, people! New toy!
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Check out my Clarion Write-a-Thon page, and please consider sponsoring me for my 6 weeks of writing - or find someone else participating in the Write-a-Thon and sponsor them instead! All money goes towards funding Clarion, an amazing writing workshop. I’m pretty sure I’ll never be able to leave my life for 6 weeks to do nothing but WRITE (until maybe my kids have left home) but participating in the Write-a-Thon is my way of joining the fun (and harnessing all that creative power, yeehah!).