Pain and Productivity: A Writer’s Life

Spend the weekend writing. Wrote for nine and eleven hours straight on Saturday and Sunday, respectively. By the time I shut my laptop yesterday, my arms were throbbing lengths of agony with half-numb typing stubs on the end. But I didn’t feel a thing until I stopped.

I can certainly feel them this morning. Ouch owie ow. Can’t take anything to dull the pain, of course. Anything over the counter won’t work, and in fact will likely make them worse, and I don’t have any tramadol with me. ‘Sides, if I took a tramadol, it would take all my willpower not to become a drooling zombie at my desk. Certainly couldn’t write.

Writing Stuff

I’ve shoved everything aside to work on the story (tentatively titled “Daughter of Fire in the Clan of Bó-tù”–which I think might be overlong) for the Datlow/Windling anthology, including all the outstanding Tangent and The Town Drunk items. My things-to-do list is beginning to look like it’s acquired sentience and has launched a campaign for world domination. And I’ve even stopped adding things to it that need to go on ’cause I haven’t wanted to interrupt the writing.

This could get scary. Um, I’ll think about that tomorrow . . .

New Words:
– 8041 on “Daughter of Fire in the Clan of Bó-tù” with almost 4K of those just from yesterday.

Mostly at zero draft. Maybe call it 96% to zero draft. ‘Course, I haven’t looked at huge chunks of the words I put down yesterday, yet. I suspect vasty huge gobs of them are crap and will need to be cleaned up. But by and large, the story’s on the page. Some of the dialogue is just sketched in, and a couple places I shoved in a “and this happens here” synopsis when the ideas and story were coming out faster than I could compose readable prose. And there are a couple big question mark placeholders when I had ad hoc research items I needed to look up but didn’t want to stop to do.

Again, I wonder if I’m simply better suited to be a short story writer. I hit flow. Boy, did I. How I conceptualize stories just seems better suited for shorter lengths.

Then again, this is another case of word count creep, turning out longer than I expected (and I still gotta flesh out the “and this happens here” patches–I’m a wee bit concerned that I might end up pushing the 10K max.), which suggests that maybe I might be working my way up to novel-length. ‘Course getting there via word count creep is going to get somewhat grisly once I hit the “novella” stage.

8,041 / 9,000 (89.3%)

– 200 on the Fox Princess novel.

15,333 / 40,000 (38.3%)

Club 100 for Writers: 13