Total word count, hearthcraft book: 51,047
New words today: 1,015
That may not seem like a lot of movement, but I dipped down to almost 49K after cutting out sections of deadwood. I’m actually moderately stunned at the day’s work. Unfortunately, I’m also mildly hyperventilatory (is that a word? it is now) about the amount of carrots left to pull off.
We have arrived at the stage of carrots. Moving words around so that they make more sense; expanding ideas; cutting things out that regrettably don’t add anything of direct value. Carrots, of course, is a term created by Ceri and I to describe a measure of something non-quantifiable as pertains to writing. They’re an acknowledgement of energy expended in making the work better.
The book is improving. There are many carrots. It just doesn’t feel like it, because the word count isn’t reflecting the general amelioration of worth.
I have to do this before thundering onward and throwing more words at the book, because I need to know where words should be happening. What are the bits that just kind of trail away into nothing? Where is there a leap instead of a logical bridge? Where are the places where I start out arguing one thing, and end with an entirely different conclusion about a different topic? What sections are in the wrong place? (I made chapter 1 make a heck of a lot more sense by moving two parts around, for example, and now it has a much more sensible structure.) What is missing entirely? What have I outlined but not delivered? And does it need to be delivered, or can it be cut out without robbing the book of something crucial?
It just feels like I’m dabbling and fooling around instead of working. I can’t entirely quash the little internal editor that yells “MAKE MORE WORDS!”. Putting a mass of new words down will only end up making more carrot-work later on; it would be an inefficient use of my time and energy.
Total word count, hearthcraft book: 50,032
New words today: 1,928
If I had any energy at all I’d make a push for another seventy-ish words to make a 2K yield for the day, but no way. It was hard enough getting the MS past 50K. I wanted to quit before noon.
Have a good weekend, everyone. I’m going to go pass out until I have to rouse myself to make spaghetti sauce.
I wish I could talk about the role of appliances in hearthcraft and home-based spirituality without sounding like I’m flighty and unbased in any sort of reality.
Total word count, hearthcraft book: 48,104
New words today: 2,329
One wonders how much I could have done if I had not crashed and been useless between one-thirty and three-thirty. Stupid blood sugar. Why have you dropped like a stone the past two days when I’ve been feeding you properly?
A basic purification ritual, smudging and making smudge sticks, and incense today.
Am beginning to see 50K looming, and am now quietly panicking about fitting everything in under 60K. I may end up cutting things out. This is not unusual. The problem is deciding what bits I haven’t yet written that are least important and therefore can be excised without impacting the strength and quality of the book.
A thousand words before lunch. Well, before noon, anyway; I had leftover homemade pizza around eleven this morning.
This is a Good Start to a Good Day. Even if it all goes downhill from here, I have a thousand new words.
I worked one fifteen-minute set, then went directly into another timed quarter-hour because I didn’t want to lose my train of thought. The I took a break to put a load of laundry in, worked through the third official timed quarter-hour, and kept going when it ended to finish up the section. Fifteen minute blocks are easy. Ten minutes is too short, a half-hour is too long, but fifteen minutes… Why didn’t I start doing this ages ago?
Total word count, hearthcraft book: 45,775
New words today: 1,909
Terms, techniques, recipes. Made pizza dough for tonight, cut a third off to make focaccia as a snack for myself, devoured it all except for one wee wedge, realized that focaccia is hearth-bread, and added a recipe for it because really, how perfect is that?
Best tyop of the day: “Ficus on the goal”.
Today, as part of my plan (a) to not panic and (b) increase self-discipline so things would actually get done (oh, and (c) not burn myself out) I wrote in timed fifteen-minute periods, giving myself a break between each of them. On those breaks, which were often fifteen minutes themselves, I made tea, lunch, a snack, or checked mail and poked around the Internet. It worked very, very well because not only did I control my break time, I could see how much writing I actually got done in fifteen minutes without distraction.
In a somewhat unrelated aside, now that I’m wearing my glasses pretty much all the time, when I don’t wear them my eyes hurt.
I think I’m okay as regards the whole ‘ack this isn’t a BOOK yet’/’how am I going to fit everything in’ issue. If I finish smoothing out what I’ve got (i.e. make real sentences and link them) and write the missing bits, compose the blessings and rituals, and DON’T GET SIDETRACKED BY SHINY NEW IDEAS, everything should just about come in at 60K as a tidy parcel.
And because it was work-avoiding last Friday while I should have been working on the copy-edits of the pregnancy book, I didn’t formally record the progress made in the hearthcraft book. So here, for the sake of complete record-keeping:
New words February 29: 817
New total: 43,866