Look! I wrote!

New words today: 1,558
Total word count, Orchestrated: 65,567

This may not seem like a big thing to you (I do it for a living, after all) but it is to me. You see, for the past month I’ve been making the anthology my priority: contacting people (both original contributors for clarifications and new potential contributors), working things out, discussing drafts, pinging people with reminders and sounding them out about ideas, and going through the existing material to make notes about it and fact-check and such. And I’m brain-dead by mid afternoon, and there isn’t enough energy to address my own work when my brain officially notifies me about overdosing on the anthology. (Remember the whole fibro-and-shutting-down thing? Yeah, that too.)

Well, today I decided to sit down and crank out at least a thousand words of Orchestrated. I’d been dragging my heels on it because I had written myself into a boring spot and didn’t have much of an idea how to work through it. The past couple of nights as I’ve been lying awake I’ve been thinking about it, and decided to end the chapter where it was and start a new one two days later in the story. It’s moderately ironic because I’m a huge advocate of ‘just go to the next scene that you know how to write and leave yourself a note in between’, but for some unfathomable reason I just kept trying to slog along to connect the scene that was over and the next major event when they didn’t need to connected at all.

My goal was a thousand words by noon, and here we are at noon, and I have over fifteen hundred, and thank gods I’m past that stupid swampy bit that I didn’t even need to be in. There’s a substantial amount of the last chapter that will end up on the cutting room floor, I suspect. And the official new target is 70K, which means I need to wrap it up in 4.5K. I might be able to do it, too. If not, I know it will be edited down to between 65 and 70K once it’s all finished and gets tightened up in revision.

Right! Lunch, then anthology wrangling.