August Writing Goals and Updates

It’s been a brutally busy summer. With my syndrome, no travel is easy, and I’ve had to hit the road three times already, and there are two more big pushes before my birthday. As I type this, I find my left hand is shaking a little too much to seem polite. From the 15^th to the 22^nd I’ll be hosting a college reunion, and from the 29^th to September 4^th I’ll be at ChiCon.

That gave me from August 5^th-14^th and 23-28^th as pure work time. Barring syndrome flare or emergency, I’ve already got a schedule in mind. The current work-in-progress, The Last House in the Sky, is at ~63,000 words.

The current 5-14^th stretch has given me a leisurely nine days to get over 70,000, in which I’ve aspired to write the build-up to the climactic sequence of chapters. I expect to hit it by Friday, and perhaps worm a little further. I wouldn’t dare spoil what’s building, but it’s the biggest thing this fictional world has seen for at least two hundred years. Also, there are robots and dinosaurs.

The 23-28^th stretch gives me six days to write either the entire climactic stretch, or the first half of it, leading to the convalescence of surviving characters and the stuff I’ve been daydreaming about writing for months. If I hit the full 90,000 then, that’d be great. Rough drafts can close loose. I only ask, though, to get over 75,000, and maybe up to 80,000, with a more realistic expectation of writing through certain storyline events. The chapters will definitely be more important that the word count by then, just as they were in my early-July push.

On September 4^th I’ll be in the clear from all unusual obligations. It looks like the promised time, and it’s even my birthday. It’d be nice to have only ten thousand words to knock off before closing the rough draft on the manuscript, but anything below 15,000 can be done in a couple weeks.

Even feeling sick today and electing it as my weekly day off, I’m terribly excited. The productivity I’ve experienced, day-for-day and week-for-week, has been unlike anything else I’ve written in my life. It’s only now, with two thirds of the draft behind me and all the travel issues, that I’m starting to flag. This novel is also a little lighter story than the previous work-in-progress, The House That Nobody Built, funnier, more open with its heart. To compare to film, The House That Nobody Built was Kurosawa, where The Last House in the Sky is Miyazaki. Not that I ape either director in my prose, but that’s been the feeling of the two rides.

I’ve never been this productive in prose in my life. About time, I tell myself.