Milestones



I broke the one-third point today:
Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
40,801 / 120,000
(34.0%)


Unfortunately, I've also passed the halfway point on my allotted time (began 6/12, due 11/15). Well, I'm taking the next week off from work in order to try to catch up (and celebrate my birthday, and be around for the first day of school, and try to catch up on sleep, and do some work on possibly getting our house ready to sell in preparation for moving into a new house...!).

I just finished chapter 17 of 50, which is right on target. With 50 chapters, I'm aiming for 2,400 words a chapter. 2,400 x 17 is 40,800, so I call that just about perfect.

I saw my brother perform here in Seattle a couple of weekends ago. He asked me at one point if I found that blogging about my writing helped motivate me to do it. Interesting question. Actually, I think the thing that is my strongest motivation is my contract, with that 11/15 deadline specified for the first draft. That's pretty strong motivation, especially when combined with the Excel spreadsheet that tells me just how far behind I am on a day-to-day basis. (Today, I'm 19,199 words behind where I had hoped to be by the end of the day Sunday.) Seeing that number every day is a beating.

Hence this vacation.

The house we're hoping to buy, by the way, is about a half a mile from the beach where I did all that writing while I was on my last vacation. And a half mile in the other direction is the park where our son's school had a picnic last weekend, where we stood by the beach and saw a bald eagle flying by. That'd be the good life.
This would be the view from my little writing loft.

This is all very tentative, because there's a contingent offer on the house already. If those folks manage to sell their house in the next week, they'll get this one and we won't. So we're in this weird, stressful waiting game.

Posted: Fri - September 1, 2006 at 08:52 PM        

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