A thousand words

Tonight I passed the 51,000 mark on my work-in-progress, the second Blue Plate Mystery. I have a new writing plan. On January 2nd, I sat down at my desk and told myself to begin the book. It didn't matter if I only wrote 500 words. I would begin. I wrote a thousand words that night--maybe a little less than four typewritten pages--and found it wasn't that hard. So that became my goal--a thousand words a night. I think I've missed two nights (haven't checked this against a calendar): one night when my kids and grandkids were in town and half of them were staying with me, and last Tuesday night when I wanted to watch the State of the Union address and the response. I loved the former, thought it substantive and clear, and laughed aloud over poor Senator Rubio and his great, all-consuming thirst--a plastic water bottle on TV? But I digress.
Someone asked me the other night when I write, did I write daily, etc. My previous answer has alwawys been no, I have no schedule. I write when I can. I found though that this haphazard approach meant there were long spells when I didn't work on the novel, and I began to lose the thread. I can in no way judge whether or not the new routine is making a better book or not. Once through the draft, I will send it to my favorite beta reader for a critique. But I do feel it's making me linger over scenes and bring them to life more, to delve deeper into my characters. My beta reader always says, "What's your hurry?" and reminds me of his writing professor at Rice who said you should be able to see every scene like a photograph--a goal I try to keep in mind. I have written almost all of this one at night--mornings are taken up with business, errands, grocery, doctors, email, the newspaper, and so on. It's been easier to discipline myself to write at night. Hmmm, wonder if you'd call me a full time wirter? I can't spend six hours at the computer--after two hours at the most, I begin to write drivel.
Most writers write long and then have to go back and cut. Standard advice is to "kill your darlings." You have to delete scenes that you think are really great but don't move the story along, sometimes even delete favorite characters. Once a group of us wrote a collaborative novel, Noah's Ride, and one chapter ended with a baby and three children in danger. The next chapter was to be written by a friend of mine, and I said, "Mary, don't you dare kill that baby." Her reply? "The baby will be all right, but pray for the other children." And by gosh, she killed them in a house fire.
I have no such problem. At 51,000 the end is in sight. I know what's going to happen, and I'm crossing my fingers I can make it to 60,000 words. I'll probably pick up two or three thousand more in rewriting and editing. The usual word count for a cozy is 70,000 but anywhere in the sixties is acceptable and that's where I'm setting my sights.
I've written my thouand for tonight, after dinner with a good friend. Now to read that book I'm reviewing. Not far enough into it yet to form an opinon.

Distraction, Procrastination, and Writing Habits

A big distraction! This is how I'm spending the weekend. Megan and Brandon came from Austin for her 20th high school reunion--who can believe?--and I babysat Sawyer, 4, and Ford, not quite 2. Jacob is the one in the middle. I owe Jordan a fancy lunch, dinner, whatever, because she came over and helped get everyone fed, diapered and pajamed, and all tonight. I know--I used to do it all myself with four, not two, and others would come into my house amazed at the pandemonium amidst which I was, so they tell me, fairly quiet as I explained that 5:30 was the "fussing hour." Hungry, tired babies. But that was almost 40 years ago, and I'm a tad older, a tad less resilient. Still, I did the cooking, Jordan marshalled the kids, and we had an almost sane dinner hour--one biting incident, much jumping on beds which is a no-no in my house. But then we settled down to read and all was well.

The boys are fun, but they are exhausting--and the Austin boys are not as used to being here as Jacob, so Ford cried long and hard before he went to sleep tonight. But I'm loving it, because I haven't known these boys as well as the others, and this has been a great weekend for "bonding." Now they not only know "Gaga" but they know my house, the toys I keep (including the train set I thought was going back to Austin), the animals--"yes, you may give the dog a bone, no, don't touch the cat!" I hope they'll come more often now.

One of the Sisters in Crime listservs has been full of discussions of distractions, and how you prevent them from keeping you from your writing. With all those comments about writing habits, naturally I examined my own. I have, as readers of this blog know, not been writing for over a week--a "big" birthday weekend, recovery from that--cleaning up the details at home, writing thank-yous, generally getting my feet back under me--kept me from writing as did anticipation of this weekend when I would again be distacted. And I've written about the Julia Spencer-Fleming novels that have me so engrossed that I'm neglecting my own writing--like I can't live in two extra worlds at once. But I think there's even something else going on. I think I tend to put my writing on the back burner when I'm not sure where it's going. Yes, I have some notes, but I'm uncertain about what happens between here and there, when it is time to introduce yet another element, am I making the people real enough. The latter is a question the Spencer-Fleming novels make me ask, because her characters are so real to me. I know the cure for this--and it's hard work. Start on page one, read the whole thing over again, make notes, and move on. Even if you move on in the wrong direction, at least its movement. Maybe I'll think about that Monday.

Meantime, I have the last of a novel to finish reading, I think maybe both Sawyer and Ford have gone to sleep--Ford screamed for probably half an hour. I rubbed his back, gave him more milk, told him Mama would be home soon, but he was pretty much inconsolable.