One of my early goals for the year was to get Holland Bay completely rewritten by Valentine’s Day. Ask me how that went. G’wan. Ask me.
Wilmington College has a four week break between Fall and Spring semesters. I decided I would take all that time I spent writing essays and reading short stories and doing case studies to go all out and write a new Holland Bay from scratch. I had an ambitious goal of cramming 90,000 words into a time from Thanksgiving weekend to the week after New Year’s, then spending maybe a month to finish up.
I got reminded why it took almost three months to finish Northcoast Shakedown, Second Hand Goods, and Bad Religion in first draft. I might have all this time to sit and write, but there’s a limit to what I can write. I’m writing this post on Sunday, waiting for the Superbowl to begin (and procrastinating doing a run). I wrote two scenes this morning, but beyond that, I had to shift gears. A blog post is not a work of fiction. It’s basically like a newspaper column (if you do it right.) So I don’t have to exert myself mentally the way I do writing a novel or a short story.
So instead of 90,000 words, I have 25,000. My pace is picking up, and I’m building momentum, but it was slow-going getting started. Most of what I’ve written came in the last thirty days. It just goes to prove you can’t plan this stuff. And it’s not like when I started writing, when I’d often come home from a second job and park at the computer to wind down from a long day.
As long as this isn’t a chore, though, I’ll keep doing this.
