Friday, April 23, 2010

Writer's Retreat: Day 0

My wife, bless her, has sent me away on my annual writer's retreat. I am approximately 90,000 words into my novel, and figure I have about 60,000 to go, so I won't likely finish this trip, but I would very much like to take a significant bite out of that remainder -- I'm hoping if I get close enough to the end, I can keep nibbling away at it even after the retreat and actually finish this year. What the retreat gives me is the opportunity to intensely re-immerse myself in the material again, get some momentum, and hopefully start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. So I'd like to set myself a quota of about 1500 words a day minimum (i.e., before I can go play) and am hoping that I can crank it up much higher than that -- say, 4000 words a day, if I can really get inspired. So, just as I did for NaNoWriMo, I'm going to post my word count here each day as a motivational tool.

Most of today went to travel: took the Canadaline to the airport, waited for my flight, flew to LA, took two hours to get to the hotel... by the time I dealt with some leftover issues from work via email, it was almost time for bed. So I wasn't expecting to get anything done today beyond some tentative outlining. I am a bit worried that I could stall out immediately, because of course I had stopped at a point where I was having a lot of trouble with the next couple of scenes. They are not working and I'm not quite sure why. So since they are not jelling in my head, I'm terrified when I sit down to write tomorrow, nothing is going to come out. Hopefully the NaNoWriMo philosophy will once again assert itself and I'll just plow forward, damn the torpedoes of internal critics, and something will fall out.

In the meantime, the itinerary calls for a good night sleep tonight. (Feels a bit like the night before an exam, but also like Christmas eve; I'm pretty excited!

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