Thanksgiving weekend. Working Thursday and Friday, I got in 2800 words, going over the 75,000 mark. That means it's officially a novel-length manuscript. That took four months from the time I wrote the first words; almost five months from the time I began making notes. Not too bad for something I hadn't the slightest inkling of before receiving the call from Felice in April.

I finally completed the 4th point from the above list, which means I have 1-5 done. 6 and 7 are somewhat trivial, so with some additional work today and tomorrow, I absolutely should finish the first draft by next weekend.

I should say that the work this week has taken place in the context of Thanksgiving, a visit by S., who stayed overnight at our place for three nights (I just got back from taking her to the airport), and the cast on Cris's leg. So I did all this work at home in the office. For somebody with a cast on their leg, Cris was great about letting me work. Letting me sleep is another matter, but I'll leave that for my personal diary.

My plan is to make some notes and then go to bed for a few hours, due to the disruptions last night.

I think maybe my best strategy should be to bring things to a fairly quick conclusion. It's been drawn out enough.
  1. Greg can't believe Hap is ambivalent. Might be a good place for a Greg story that highlights the notion of striking fast.
  2. Don might check on Hap, give him more pressure.
  3. The next morning, Bianca emerges from Seth's bedroom with him. Everyone thunderstruck. Seth story.
  4. Bart makes it clear he's going with Don's idea.
  5. Something makes Hap not want to go with Don -- even though he'd now get credit for it. He goes to tell Don, but Don is talking to Denny, who announces he's decided to throw his money behind Dreedle as well. Don still doesn't know Bart is coming along. Even though he could now get on board with Don, Hap impulsively decides to reject the Dreedle idea and Don's money, or promises of it. He tells Don and Denny.
  6. Denny and Hap have the Citizen Kane conversation in which Denny tells Hap why he can't save him.
  7. In the car on the way down the mountain. Everyone's all excited about Dreedle, except Seth, who simply wears a dreamy, satisfied expression. Finally they ask Hap if he's joining Dreedle, and he says no. When Bart says "But what about your apartment" Hap says there is more than one way to buy a house. He'll figure out a way to do it.
  8. Coda showing his homecoming in SF.
I guess that's all right. I'll sleep on it now.

 
1:40 pm -- Becalmed. I went to bed for a couple hours but didn't sleep much. I did think idly about this book but not much came to mind except stuff I'd already written.

It's always harder the third day in a row that I work on something. I think the best pattern for me is to make notes on Friday night, sleep on it and then start fresh right away on Saturday, get a lot done, then come back Sunday and polish it off with another 2000 words or so. That's the way to do a consistent 5000 words a weekend instead of the closer to 4300 I've been averaging.

Popular posts from this blog

Datamining your Twitter feed

Just as I predicted in How They Scored: Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines. -- Kara Swisher, All Things D
Read more
Yesterday I wrote about 2500 words as a backstory to Shaun... this morning I wrote another 2000, and I only now have just picked up Shaun. Most of that was a story about a girlfriend they shared, Robin. I modeled her on the real Robin I slept with only once or twice back in 1980 -- a cheerful blond girl who had not lost all her babyfat, whom I met doing contact improv. There was one memorable moment in my affair with her -- the moment I came inside her. Other than that, I remember walking her to her place over on Parnassus afterward, and running into her and her mother on a Muni bus some time later after we had mostly lost touch with each other, and trying to keep up a correspondence with her when she moved back to Washington, DC. She was someone I never really knew much about -- I don't know whether that was because she was rather young and unformed, or because I was too self-centered to pay attention. Probably a little of both. Anyway, I kept the blond cheerfulness, the blandness...
Read more

Why do people report on themselves?

Image
Not long after I started using Twitter, I started to wonder: Why? Imagine the familiar movie scenario where a detective is desperate to track and find a suspect, or where a detective is hired by a suspicious spouse to trail their errant husband or wife. Or an alternate scenario from the Cold War, where the secret police manipulate ordinary citizens to inform on one another (cf. the film The Lives of Others , pictured at left). Or the horrible situation of a controlling husband who wants to know where his wife is at every minute of the day. In those situations, one person wants to track another; the person who is tracked would rather not be tracked and sometimes would do anything to avoid it. Now consider yourself, or any ordinary bourgeois, and how much you are tracked on a daily (and sometimes minute-to-minute) basis. Credit card companies and credit reporting firms register every purchase you make with something other than cash. Airlines, grocery stores and other businesses with rew...
Read more