Four Figures

For the first time in nearly two weeks I've crossed the 1000 word boundary, adding 1139 words to Flame Dancer today. I've also got a note ready for the whole section before what I've written now "Needs more conflict!" though I'll leave that until I get around to editing this. While the events in the previous section do help the plot they're almost devoid of conflict and that as much as anything else has helped to kill my pace while writing. After a few days one gets tired of typing long stretches of "everyone gets along with each other, oh look a plot point".

Right now my MC is arguing with someone senior to him, straying quite some distance from what is considered accepted behaviour for someone in his position, and about to face a major dilemma that will have serious consequences whichever way he goes - and the words are running out as fast as my hands can type them (allowing for a little hyperbole).

Rising Slowly

Well it's not going as fast as I'd like (it seldom does) but my daily wordcount is slowly rising. With over half an hour left in the day I'm now at 500 words for the day. I hope to make it to at least 750 by midnight, but even if I don't get anything else written today it's definitely going up again.

Now that the exams are behind me I have some more time to spare for writing. But it still takes more time to turn out a given number of words than it did during my peak last November. That of course was NaNoWriMo, and I don't generally expect to write 1500 words an hour except during that wonderfully insane time of the year. There is one thing I miss from those days though, the ability to write crap and just keep writing.

Of course I adhere to some standards even during November, but there is something wonderfully liberating about having to keep going. Granted I missed the goal of 50,000 words this year, I wrote 54,000 too many. But even when you get past the goal the atmosphere keeps you going. That's long gone now, and I have to fight my inner editor over every single letter. Even when the story should by all rights be flowing smoothly.

Getting The Pace Back

I had little time for writing today. Indeed I just spent all of twenty minutes on it and must now quit for the day to go back to studying. Even so something important has happened. Not the events of the story, though one of them is the start of something important, but the result on my writing. I suddenly got some pace back into my writing.

My 240 words for today hardly reflect it, but the writing suddenly started to flow again. Basically I introduced a new character - or rather I had a new character stay 'off camera' but send a message - and pretty much the moment I'd decided to do it the writing started flowing fast again. Tomorrow will be most about the exam I have tomorrow afternoon. But after that I should get a bit more time to write again. All of a sudden I find I'm looking forward to it a lot more than I was up until half an hour ago.