This morning was not a good start. I looked at my laptop sitting on the table waiting for me to sit down and type, and the story felt stupid. Pointless. Shallow. Silly. A waste of time. I was almost in tears.

I knew what I had to write so I sat down and managed to get out 360 words. Then went and had a shower, and next thing I knew, there were two really interesting scenes demanding to be written.

(And Wren got to strut her stuff. She was one of the first characters to appear in this large cast but, I’ll admit, one I didn’t care much for. I knew she’d be interesting (in a technically challenging way) to write but she was overshadowed in the ‘planning stages’ by more demanding characters. Now that she’s had her time on stage, I fear she might be going to (try and) take over the story. She’s already given me two unplanned scenes. Short ones and structurally needed, but still. But she’s got some stiff competition in the taking over the story stakes.)

Ended tonight at bit earlier than usual with 3600 words, as I hit 20K so it seemed a good place to stop, but two tips came out of today:

1. Just write.
2. If you can’t, go and have a shower.

Something else I was thinking about, and I don’t usually over it as a writing tip because I don’t know if it’s the same for other people, and that is, the more I write, the easier it is. The first words need to be dragged out. I’ll sit there working for an hour and the word count is 250, then 320, then 460… So. Slow. Then it starts to get easier. Then, somewhere in about high 3000s, it get much easier. 200 words until the next round figure? Easy. Wrote too many. Not it’s jut 180 words to the next target figure. Until I finally have to force myself to stop and go to bed.

So writing, say 15000 words a day, isn’t writing 1000 words fifteen times. By then, the words are just coming and it’s just a matter of being able to type enough to get them down. But sure if it works like that for most people 🙂

Also, backup your work. (No, I was just talking about it earlier.)