Day One: My Eyes Hurt

Some thoughts on my day one experience, after a short walk, a good supper, some sugary snacks, snuggles, and drumming video games.

I only really felt like I got into my character around 4:00 this afternoon. The timing of this was excellent because I was starting to get worried about making 10,000 words in a decent time. Finally getting the feel for what Dahlia was like made the last three thousand words go by really quickly, and for once I enjoyed both what I was writing and the process of writing itself.

Breaks are necessary. Absolutely necessary. I have to get over my guilt if I take an extra ten minutes at lunch to not look at my monitor screen. My eyes are well and truly exhausted after working at my laptop for eighty percent of the day. It only makes sense that I look away from seven inches in front of my face, if only to stare out the window in silence.

When asking someone to proof read your copy, don't say, "I don't think you'll like it. It has lesbians."

Most troubling for me is that I took forty minutes to revise my outline, and I'm still going to be around 6,000 words short of my goal. And I'm being generous. I'm going to sleep on the outline tonight and take another look at it in the morning. I have gone "off outline" a few times, but only in so far as I've changed the settings and roles of characters slightly. This is both good and bad. Right now I'd almost welcome the opportunity to go "off outline," if only I could get more plot out of it. I think I took a plot for a short story, and decided this was a good opportunity to make a novella out of it, and this is probably not such a good idea.

I'm feeling good. If I feel like this after another ten hours of writing tomorrow, I'll be quite pleased.

P.S. Writing from 8:00 am until 7:00 pm with lunch breaks and short "move your legs" breaks really is not fun. When I dragged my butt back to my laptop after lunch Kaz asked, "Isn't this supposed to be fun?"

"No," I said.

"Then what's the point?"

"To have a finished work in a short period of time."

"Then go write!"

No more today. Back at it tomorrow.