Day 3. Confidence is high.
I’m off to a slower start than I’d planned, with only 18,000 words written so far. But things are finally ramping up, and I’m confident I’ll still reach my goal.
Friday was supposed to be my travel day to kick off the writing retreat, but I ended up being delayed for a day. I did manage to review almost 30,000 words (about 100 pages) of manuscript to re-connect with the story since I hadn’t worked on it in a few weeks.
Saturday I drove from Oregon to Nevada, and thanks to the helpful advice from Google maps, I left the main highway to take a shortcut through the mountains. At home, Spring is definitely in the air, but in the mountains it’s still very much winter. None of the driving was really perilous, but there were six-foot-plus snow banks, and blowing snow in places. Luckily I had snow tires and my car is all-wheel drive, so I made it through without any trouble. The trip took about eight hours.
I still managed to write 3,578 words Saturday night.
Sunday is always my down day and I couldn’t kick that habit despite how badly I wanted to dive into the story. I rested, took a hike along a nearby mountain, but decided to head back when I noticed cougar tracks in the snow. I only managed 3,385 words.
Today was my first big writing day. I started at about 9:00 AM and wrote almost non-stop until 3:00 PM, with only brief rests. I took a break from 3:00 until about 4:30 PM and wrote another two hours after that. I really got in the zone today and the hours flew by.
Today I managed 11,655 words.
Good day!
This novel, Set In Stone, is the first book I completely outlined prior to beginning to write, so I know exactly what I need to do, and I can just let my fingers fly. I do free-writing within each chapter, but nothing came up today that threatened to derail the overall outline plan so I had no major delays. It was just a matter of planting myself in the chair and not leaving.
If I can continue with this same focus through Friday, I should be able to reach the goal of 50,000 words in 1 week without too much trouble.
After stopping for the day and talking on the phone with my family for a while, I soaked in a hot tub for 45 minutes.
Just what I needed.
