Don't touch that fire extinguisher

My hot streak has continued.Yesterday, I wrote another 1,955 words! This brings my running total above the 10,000-word mark by a healthy margin:

Things will probably slow down a little today, because I need to rework the next part of the outline. The way I've written the last couple of scenes dictates that the outline I have for the next two or three needs to be tweaked quite a bit. So I suppose that most of today's work time will be spent reshaping the next scene or two, with enough left over to write my minimum of 500 words. Unless my fire is still burning after all the outline work and I can zip through an extra 500 or so.

That's actually a real possibility, since I've reached the point where I'm actually "living" in this novel world of mine now. That's when my creativity hits overdrive and I just don't want to stop writing until it feels like the right time to quit. Although I love being inside the head of my protagonist so much, I never really feel like stopping. I just have to sometimes, to eat and sleep and stuff.

Anyway, I'm off to rework the outline. Wish me luck!

Fire in the hole!

I had another creative explosion yesterday, during which I wrote 2,887 words! I started a scene and it sort of caught fire, and I didn't want to stop until I'd finished it. This brings my running word total to the strangely round number of 9,800:

Look at that red progress bar! I'm closing in on 10% completion on the first draft.

The next section of the plot plan will need some retooling, because at this point, there is a slight gap between what I had specifically planned to do and what I actually wrote, so it's unlikely I'll get anywhere near even a thousand words written today. But it's really nice to have made this much progress.

Increasing the saturation

If you read the last post (all three of you - you know who you are), you may recall that I left off with a word count of 2,135 and was concerned that I was trying to sabotage my effort to complete a first draft.

Well, I'm not worried about that anymore. At least, not right now. Why not? Well, let's just say I had a bit of an explosion of productivity this weekend, quite unexpectedly. Remember, my baseline goal is 500 words a day, but on Friday, I set an informal goal of doing 1,000 each on Saturday and Sunday. Take a look at the ol' word counter now:

That's right. I went into the weekend aiming for another 2,000 words and somehow wound up writing over 4,000. The really extraordinary part is that I didn't spend that much time actually writing. Most of my weekend was taken up with doing research on the areas of Portland where the bulk of my novel is set, areas that I "know" but didn't really know.