Now last week was a very good week for writing. I finished a short and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXII (for which I got one of those nice rejections where it seems like the editor really is regretful that they can't buy it; they already have something else too similar. The story in question has already moved on to the next slush pile). That one I had been working on for a week before, had my critique group give it a good go-over, then rewrote it to fix the problems. You know, my usual writing thang. I was working on that in the afternoons during my writing time.
But I also had an idea for the latest Backspace contest that I really wanted to commit to paper. But that MZB story was taking up all my time. So I broke from my usual way of writing by staying up til 2 a.m. two nights running to write the whole thing out, then getting up early on Friday to type it all up, give it a rather rigorous edit (it was 800 words over the parameters, I had to lose an entire scene plus a lot of adjectives it probably didn't need in the first place).
I must say, I was very pleased with how it came out, considering. I might even consider changing up my writing habits (except I'm still feeling sleep lag; the problem with my schedule is that there is never any time to make up missed sleep. I have no "weekend" to sleep late, it's school or work every day of the week).
But the other thing about writing that short is that I was writing at a sprint, and I didn't edit it much before posting. Which makes me wonder how the novel would come out if I wrote it the same way.
So the plan is to write all the way to THE END in the next three weeks, a first draft commited to paper at a sprint. I'll wait until the end to put in the computer and start tweeking. Since I religiously outline, I know exactly what needs to happen and when, so this should be doable. Barring collapsing from exhaustion, of course.
So, Day 1 (yesterday): 3450 words. Pretty much all of chapter nine (although I did stick a few Post-Its on there, so that for draft 2 I remember to actually describe a few things which need describing). Now Monday is the one day of the week I never work (unless someone specifically calls me to ask me to), so I'm not expecting to hit that number every day. Still, not too shabby.
Since Quin was in Ohio I rewarded myself with a Jet Li movie: The Legend. I laughed my ass off, but I think the writing sprint had me a little punchy. Still, any movie where a man says "The man who can beat my wife can marry my daughter" is by definition my kind of movie (and when the man who beats his wife is actually the hero's mother in disguise...)
On a totally unrelated note, here's a little quiz I picked up from Written Wyrdd:
The same web site had another quiz which I took:
You know, it was a lot of the same questions, and I answered the same way. How I ended up being both Gandhi and Apocalypse Now I don't know. Didn't see that coming...
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