I don’t want to write today. Part of this has to do with how sick I’m feeling (go away, you damned cold, go away), and part with the fact that Liam’s not napping this morning. No one ever tells you how tiring it is, trying to put a kid to sleep.
Maybe if I skip the tidying up needed at the end of this first section and jump right into the second part, I wil be more interested in doing it.
No, I think all I want to do today is curl up with a book and read. Oh dear.
Today I felt like I was racing to get nowhere. I hate those kind of days.
I spent the last three hours working, yes, honest to goodness working. I updated that proposal and sent it off (according to my notes I last submitted it in August of 2004 — yikes), and tried to write two more.
And wow, did it ever hurt. I’m so out of practice. Even looking at my old ones, I floundered for ideas and wrote in a stilted, rusty, hollow-sounding fashion instead of the exciting and dynamic style required. A proposal is part outline, part marketing selling tool, and the marketing bit has totally flown away from me over the past two years. My brain hurt (no, really, I needed to take Tylenol), and I wasn’t looking forward to orchestra.
Imagine my surprise when I was called at six to be told that orchestra was cancelled, as our rehearsal venue is unavailable and no one told us ahead of time. This is bad, because we only have a few rehearsals left before July 1, but also a relief, because as a result of struggling with proposals I’m nowhere near the headspace orchestra requires. So because I didn’t get a chance to go out and pick up a few things this afternoon (the proposals took twice as long as I’d expected them to — ah, optimism), I’m heading out now instead.
Total word count, Swan Sister: 10,971
Total words today: 2,196
I started writing around 8:25, and finished at 9:25. This word yield would have been halved if HRH hadn’t been here to get Liam when he woke up earlier than expected from his nap. Mind you, it wouldn’t have been a problem if HRH hadn’t been here, because it was his voice that woke Liam up. However! As an apology he gave me an extra half-hour to write, and thus the aftermath of the death has been dealt with, and we have had the second proposal, and things are moving right along. I think there’s only another eight pages or so to wrap up this section before I shift into part two with a new protagonist, new setting, and new problems.
Today was the first day in the new writing schedule, and look:
Total word count, Swan Sister: 8,771
Total words today: 853
I started to write at 8:20. Liam woke up at 9:00, effectively ending the session. But before I stopped I’d managed to successfully kill off the title character, as set forth in my outline. So that’s the proposal done, and the death done. I can check two major things off my list, and the story can continue to advance. I’m really settling into the style more comfortably too, which is a relief after having it dissolve through the typed words like mist whenever I thought I’d hit it.
Mind you, today’s success may have had something to do with how long I was awake before I sat down to write. I woke up at 5:30 AM, thanks to a wretched cold that has ambushed me and taken my sinuses and my throat hostage. So I was very awake, and had been for some time, and had had time to think about how to handle the scene (plus draw a map to clear up what was where, which had to be done as well). We’ll see if it all still works when I sleep in till sevenish like I usually do.
But establishing a writing schedule again is a Good Thing, not just for my creative sanity but because it looks like I’m dusting off and rewriting the old spellcrafting through the seasons proposal that was “nice but not now” when I originally did it a couple of years back, as well as drawing up an idea for a series (not all by me, of course, but I’d like to do one title for it). It’s so very nice to be asked, “What do you feel like writing?”
My Wicca book had an initial print run of, oh, let’s say, X in September 2005.
This May, they had to do a second print run of 1/2 X.
What does this mean? My books sells muchly. So much so that a second print run was called for nine months later.
The spellcraft book had a slightly larger initial run, so I don’t think it has reprinted yet. As for the green witch book, it’s a more specialised topic, so the print run for it is the smallest so far. I know you’re curious (or you ought to be in order to have the proper context to appreciate all this), so here’s a little fact: the average print run for a book in the New Age market is around 5,000. All three of mine were higher than that. The first was almost double it, in fact.
I was rather astonished, myself.
And I am such an industry geek.
How long has it been since I’ve posted a book update? Long enough that I’m practically turning somersaults as I write this.
Total word count, Swan Sister: 7,911
Total words today: 3,071
I love Mousme with much love, for having her here while I wrote meant that I dragged my clunky little laptop out of the closet instead of working with the desktop, recopied my files to a second floppy that worked in the laptop, and wrote all day instead of fiddling around on the internet or with photo files or music or other shiny things that distract me.
It was Liam’s day at his grandma’s, and I deliberately planned a writing jam so that I couldn’t do anything else but write — no errands, no naps, no kicking about. I wrote/thought about/planned/discussed the novel all day. Between elevenish and fiveish I was a writer again, even during the breaks for food and discussion and phone calls and visitors. And ye gods, it worked. I almost doubled my existing word count. I wrote the proposal scene that I couldn’t write until I had at least two straight hours to handle it, and now things are moving in the story. I now have writing momentum, too. I want to keep going.
All I needed was an uninterrupted day doing it and the discipline of someone with me to get that scene written in its entirety. Now I think I can count on the hourish nap Liam has in the early morning to keep writing this book scene by scene. Instead of doing the correspondence/newsreading thing when I turn the computer on, I’ll write as much as I can for as long as his nap lasts, and I’ll handle e-mail and such during his second shorter nap. I will unplug the modem so that I can’t just hop online and lose half an hour. I may go back to writing on the laptop in another room, if that’s what gets the job done. It doesn’t matter how slow the laptop is if it’s not used for anything except word processing. The smaller regular keyboard is a bit hard to use after using the ergonomic board exclusively for a few years, but it’s a challenge I can handle.
Today has been such a blessing, and such a gift.
Although, I’d forgotten how much tea I go through during a writing jam. I haven’t had this much caffeine running through my body in almost two years.
– read and give feedback on a short story (yet another one I’ve had for too long)
And it was a pleasure doing it, too.
You know, I could listen to Invisible’s covers of Folsom Prison Blues and Holiday In Cambodia over and over and over… ah, the magic of playlists.