There, damn it. I broke a thousand words.

Total words, Swan Sister: 13,045
Total words today: 1,090

And I damn well wasn’t going to get up from my chair until I had. Oh, I fought my own quota with blunted tooth and slothly nail: I dawdled by getting myself frequent snacks, I used Google and Wikipedia for various things, I got sidetracked in my research again, and made myself come back over and over to what I was supposed to be doing — namely, slapping words down so that I had something, anything, to show for working on the damn thing. Even though I didn’t want to do it, I made myself write, and oh look, there’s over a thousand words to show for it. So there, you mopey little Muppet monster of an inner critic.

And by working through the bog of inertia and wrong music, I got things moving in the second part of the book. Introduced the concept of magic (or at least something supernatural) for the first time (gasp). Discovered that the book wants the central character to be the harper, not the miller’s daughter. (I may grudgingly allow them to share the slot of protagonist.) Finally got the swans to be a symbol of Something Concretely Important (not that the reader would know as of this point, but I know, and that’s a good thing).

Liam’s over playing with his godparents today. Thus I’ve had the chance to write, even though all I wanted to do was lie in bed with a pillow over my head (it’s really too hot for that), and the opportunity to make a multiplicity of posts in my neglected-as-of-late journal. We’re tidying things up to go get him now.