It's now the end of week one

So here's what I've accomplished in week one of my three week marathon:

Monday: 3495
Tueday: 2736
Wednesday: 1542
Thursday: 3353
Friday: 1158

Which is about 4000 words short of my goal for this week. Of course there's always the weekend; I might get time to write on the weekend (I think it's a tad more likely that the Swedish Bikini Team will stop by and bring me some really great beer).

Still, that's a nice chunk more than a usual week's worth of writing. In the normal flow of things, I average 1000 words a day. To give a sense of perspective to my non-writer friends, Stephen King in his book On Writing recommends writing 2000 words a day. Now Stephen King doesn't also have another fulltime job and homeschool two kids. But I also strongly suspect that Mr. King puts out more than 2000 words a day.

On a related note, Neil Gaiman recently posted some pictures on his blog of the notebook he's writing his current novel in. It's a gorgeous leather-bound Italian number and mine are just artist sketch books, but mostly I'm jealous because that bastard never crosses anything out!

So I thought I'd share my own pics. So far The Tao of Troth is in three notebooks, thusly:

The kirigami decorations are there because otherwise I have a hard time figuring out which is the front cover and which is the back. My usual inability to grasp simple things becomes even more hampered when I'm in write mode, so...

At any rate, the notebooks aren't all straight-up writing. I put a lot of things in there for reference. This page is a list of every member of the Norse village by family and age, which room in the house they sleep in, a table with all of the Norse dieties in Old Norse spellings, and a diagram of the Nine Worlds, just in case I need to know where Jotunheimr is in relation to Asgardhr.

I also have notes in there on Chinese alchemy. One of the characters from the last half of the novel is a Taoist alchemist. I very much doubt any of this will come up, since it's not really relevant to the plot, but it did help me understand the way he thinks:

This is an example of a page when the writing is going very well. Only a couple of cross-outs, a little "ooh, say this too!", and a Post-It clarifying something I thought was true when I was writing but saved the actual looking up for later (that the Spanish and Old Norse for "Greenland" is almost identical).

And here's a page from a more typical day. The "No. Dammit, no. No, not that either. Argh!" kind of day. (I don't remember this particular day, but statistically the little trailing off line marks the point when I was suddenly compelled to unload the dishwasher, or clean the bathroom, or start learning Swedish).

OK, it's time now to make dinner and then begin the endless drudgery which is the weekend.