9 September 2002

Another weekend, come and gone. Between Friday and Sunday, I got some 8,000 words written for the novel, which makes my total for the week around 10,000.

Ten. Thousand. Words. In one week. More precisely, in three days.

I'm very impressed with myself. (No, really?)

K.T. keeps track of the administrative stuff, like word counts. She posts in her blog each week her word count totals, how many hours she spent doing related tasks that weren't writing (like hashing out plot details), and every two weeks, she posts the total for the whole novel. This week it was 176,000. (Which isn't really representative, because a lot of our work over the past couple of weeks has been converting transcripts, so the count only goes up by the difference, not by the total written.)

I whined at her a few weeks ago that I didn't think I was holding up my end of this project very well. To prove me wrong, she did another word count, and we were actually just about even - a difference of maybe five thousand words, which is only three percent of the total. That means I've written approximately 88,000 words. Between 150 and 200 pages. In - wait for it - less than three months. (Everything in our index that's dated before mid-July I know I wrote before K.T. proposed this idea seriously.)

I can remember being told to write a five-page paper and groaning under its weight. I only had to write three ten-page papers in all my college career, and I might well have dropped out if it had been many more. And here I've written twenty pages in one week.

Every time I go over to K.T.'s house, I find myself staring in awe at the binder, which contains the printouts of everything we've accomplished.

It's a 3" binder. It's enormous. And yet the rings are mostly full - around 350 pages, K.T. tells me, though it may now be closer to 400. And I can't stop staring at it. It fascinates me so much that I've decided I need my own printout. (I will anyway, when we're done with the rough draft and it's time to start marking things up in red pen.) I'm printing it out slowly, fifteen to twenty pages a day. I may divide mine into two binders, one for each section of the book.

(Who knows? It might even become an incentive to finally sort out the comics, since I've got about ten binders upstairs with comics in them, from back when I was trying to come up with an alternative to long boxes. It was a failed attempt - mostly because I was too lazy to keep it up - but it doesn't make sense to go out and buy a new binder when I've got a bunch of perfectly good ones already hanging around doing nothing. I just need to take the comics out and put them in paper bags or something.)

Um. Right. Weekend. So I wrote a lot. Saturday, Matt and I were both slugs - we didn't get out of bed until just before noon. Though we did go down to Newport News and go out to dinner with K.T. and Kevin. Sunday I wrote some more, and then Matt and I met the Brandts for ice cream, which was a lot of fun. And then I tried to write some more, but I think by then I was pretty well burned out for the weekend.

Okay, so maybe it's not all that exciting. But I enjoyed it.

--Liz