…is the phrase my husband and I use when we’re being extra-productive. You know, those days when you clean the kitchen and take back the empties and get the dry cleaning and pick up cat food and go to the gym and finish a story and send it out and then take a break for lunch.
It amuses the hell out of me that I’ve apparently used it on this blog, too, because it was one of the search terms that appeared in my stats this week.
Sometimes I write like that: I know what’s got to happen and I pound away at it until it’s done and I’m all full of righteousness.
Most of the time, though, I chip and pick and retread. The word counts I post in a day are what most writers post in an hour. I rewrite the same scene four times before moving on to the next, and then I get to the end of the chapter and throw the whole thing away.
I don’t think, at this point, that a reader could tell the difference between the things I’ve written in painful little dribbles and the things I’ve written with a firehose. Even I can’t tell, after a while. What I can tell is that time keeps passing and the word count doesn’t always grow commensurately.
That will be my challenge this year: improve my average time for the rest of the chapters in the current book (working title A Game of Pants, because I do not do outlines). Seven chapters to go, roughly. Seven months, if I don’t let myself get derailed.
Some people write novels in a month. Sigh.
