Today’s my first full day back to work, so I guess that makes it the true start of my new year. So far I’m having a pretty great day, productivity-wise. I tried out a new morning routine designed to get my butt planted in my writing chair early enough to give me a solid two hours of writing before I have to switch my focus to other things, and so far, it’s working.
I used up most of my two hours this morning transferring my outline and what I’ve got written so far of Ghost of a Chance into Scrivener. Normally I start projects out there in the first place, but for NaNoWriMo I just kept everything in a Google Doc because it was simpler and faster. But now everything is neatly organized in its proper home, which makes me happy, and I still had time left to get in 466 new words. I expect that tomorrow’s word count will be much larger.
That brings Ghost to a total-so-far of 19,084 (I’d reported earlier that it was over 20K, but as I moved to Scrivener I cleaned up a lot of notes that were figuring into my word count and did some editing), and of course total words of fiction this year is 466.
After my writing time was up I took an hour-long break to eat lunch (leftover homemade chicken and rice soup, made by yours truly instead of Mr. B for a change; it was yum, if I do say so myself) and vacuum up (with the help of Mr. B) pine needles and other Christmas detritus (we took the tree down and packed away all the decorations yesterday). And now, with some e-mail and client communication out of the way, I’m commencing the start of BloPoWriMo–that’s Blog Post Writing Month. I don’t have a specific goal for this. I just hope to write and stockpile as many posts as I can for both blogs to cover times when I’m either too busy to blog or just don’t have anything to say. Currently I have lots of things to say on many subjects, and not a lot of freelance work in my queue, so I might as well take advantage of it.
And that’s my year so far. How is yours going?
Before I leave you, here’s an unspoilery snippet of today’s output:
Something crashed behind him. He spun around to see a stack of games from Jimmy’s bookshelf spilled all over the floor. Monopoly money scattered everywhere, mixed with Risk soldiers and Scrabble tiles. Out of reflex more than anything else, Doug knelt to pick up the mess. But as he reached for a handful of the letter tiles, they each started to flip over of their own accord, arranging themselves face up.
Doug sat back on his heels and watched in a dreamlike haze of surreality as the tiles gathered themselves into a neat pile on the floor. Then, one by one, they rearranged themselves into a message:
“HI DOUGIE”
Doug’s throat tightened. He put his hand over his mouth to hold in the tidal wave of mixed emotions that welled up. When he was able to speak again, his voice came out in a shaky whisper. “Jimmy? Is it really you?”
The tiles spelled out, “YES.” Then, after a moment, added, “YOU DOOF.”
Jean Marie Bauhaus 