After over a month of last minute crafting to get my costume for BayCon done, I have sat down and began writing again. My plan was to start on Tuesday, but life happened so I didn’t get going until a few days ago. Saturday I wrote 542 words. That may not seem a lot to some people, but it was the first sustained writing I had done for six weeks.
Besides being out of practice, the effect of having not written much is that my average word count has been shot to hell. I am averaging 88 words written per day at this point. My goal for this year is to average 500. I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to hit that target.
It was an interesting experience to sit down in front of the computer and apply fingers to keyboard until I reached my word count for the day. It’s not that I wasn’t writing at all during my time off. I wrote snippets here and there, mostly scratching down ideas for short stories, notes on how to fix a few scenes, and an outline for a short story. At most, I had spent five minutes frantically typing and then picked up my needles again. There wasn’t anything other than blog posts or snippets for a project I am co-writing with a friend I would count towards my daily goal.
Last Saturday I sat down and started a new project, a short story tentatively called Reading The Leaves. I won’t lie and say I picked up like I hadn’t left off at all. There were many false starts, many questionable descriptions, and a few minutes of staring at the screen wondering where the hell I was going with this idea. But slow ly the old rhythm came back. I spent a good hour getting to know my characters beyond the customer and the client. The act of putting down words felt like I was, after a long time, coming home. Parts of my brain uncramped that I hadn’t noticed were twisted into knots.
Plans for this week is to get Reading The Leaves done. It’s on on a short deadline because I want to submit it to an anthology by the end of July. After that I go back to working on Chaos Wolf, the urban fantasy novel. I’m looking forward to diving in and getting work done.