Weekend Writing Update (a thank you letter)

In the last week, I’ve written 3,678 words – a number that isn’t too shabby until you take into account that 3,667 of them have been in the last two days.

It isn’t all doom and gloom. Thanks to a stupid human trick[1], my word count spreadsheet is looking pretty nifty, and now I can at least visually see any trends in my writing chain. But that’s not why I’m back top of things. For that, I want to say thanks to my wife and a friend from work.

Last blog post, I was all kinds of concerned. I was staring at my novel’s elephant in the room – dragons – and lamenting the fact that they were nothing more than a McGuffin, pulled out when convenient but not used nearly enough in the story to warrant them being there. Two people took the time the next day to seek me out, and I they both deserve thanks.

First, Mr. Nameless at work (you know who you are, but since I didn’t say I’d do this, I don’t want to out you as a reader of inane blogs). Your words of wisdom about tropes were, if not spot on, still the words that helped me get out of my funk, get over myself, and just get back to telling the story. Thank you, hoss.

Second, my wife. If anyone will ever deserve a book dedication, it’s this woman who sat down before I left for work and told me what I needed to do to fix the story, gave me case examples for reference material, and knows me so well and completely because she could do all of this without having read a word of what I’ve written so far. Talent? Maybe. Or super power deserving a cape and special boots. Certainly proof of psychic mojo.

So I’m almost back on track. Technically still working against a negative number according to one of the formula in my spreadsheet, but all in all right on schedule for being done with the novel by the end of the summer. Other formula suggest that I am coasting my way towards victory at this point and that the worst of it is over. I scoff and laugh at their foolishness, the silly google spreadsheet formula that they are, but then my wife would have to give me another pep talk, and I’m not sure I want to waste that this soon. I have a limited number of pep talks from her in a year, I’d hate to have used one on formulae.

 

 


1. Google spreadsheets let you set a conditional background. In my case, I’ve set the conditions of 0 words as red, between 1 and 500 as yellow, between 500 and 2000 as green, and anything greater than 2000 as blue (that’s “yowzer” blue to you). Stupid automated visual tricks will save me some day.

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