Progress Report

Net gain last week: six pages. The character I did sketches for last week was demoted to minor character status, and a new one came out of nowhere to put a twist on the last 4^th of the book. I guess that's why I'm a fan of chair glue – you never know what's going to happen next unless you keep on writing.

As to progress on TYWWF, I had an e-mail from my editor, Daniel Nayeri, to let me know the first pre-proof pages were in the mail. Never knew I could get so excited about type styles, but he said he and the designer had decided on fancy first letters to open each chapter. Can hardly wait to see what it looks like!

One Step Forward, Three Steps Back

Meaning to take interest in what I'm doing all day in the woodshed, my husband often asks: How much did you write today? Tough to answer. If a 70,000-word novel takes ten years to write, that's an average of 19 or so words a day – net. But that doesn't mean I only wrote 19 words a day. I wrote pages and pages of longhand, but most of it was background sketches for characters, noodling through a possible subplot that was later discarded, or revising a section already revised a dozen times.

All this is leading up to an explanation for my progress report for this week. How much progress did I make on Clara II? I eliminated one character from the last half of the book, invented a new back-story for one of the characters in the second half of the book – and cut 39 pages out of the first 141. I hope I can look back on this week and say that was a good thing.

The Woodshed is Ready

I swept out the dead bugs and cobwebs, sprayed the geranium I brought up from Everett with deer repellant, and hooked up the computer and printer. The woodshed on San Juan Island is ready for the annual August writing intensive. I try to write a little most days year-round, but in August I write 7-10 hours a day every day and force myself through rock-walled trouble spots in my writing that have accumulated over the past year. The goal this month is drafting the last 1/3 to 1/2 of a follow-up book to The Year We Were Famous. To save myself from the weekly embarrassment of having to report no progress on this blog, I should be motivated to brainstorm my way out of dead-ends and figure out how to thread one of my secondary plots naturally throughout the last half of the book instead of dumping it into one heap in the middle. Wish me luck.