An update, at last

Most of you (I think) by now know I spent last week in Minneapolis at a professional conference for that "other thing" I do, i.e., my day job. Though the 49th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine was interesting and educational, it put a serious damper on my writing progress.

The plan was brilliant: DH and Baby Boy were staying home, due to the high cost of airline tickets and the lack of anything for them to do while I was at the conference. My mom volunteered to come, as we enjoy traveling together and it was a chance for her to get away from home and veg for a week. As long as the hotel had a pool/hot tub and cable (it did) she was good. And *I* knew that my mom usually crashed by 9 pm, being the "early to bed, early to rise" type.

So I was banking on a week of going to meetings, spending a nominal amount of time with my mom in the evenings, and then having the nights free to write with no distractions.

Except, on vacation, my mom stays up till 11 pm or later and wants to watch TV all the time. Makes it hard to write, especially when the table the laptop is on is only 10 feet away from the television. *sigh* Don't get me wrong - we had fun. I just didn't get any writing done. Sven is not happy.

On top of that, I just really wasn't happy with chapters 7 and 8 as they were. Too pat, too little tension...if my interest was flagging, knowing all the stuff that's coming up, how could I expect a reader to press on? So after a lot of internal debate and brainstorming, I tossed them. That's 5K, folks. A third of my monthly goal. Ouch.

The good news is, I worked out an idea for a new chapter 7 that ramps up the tension and makes Elspeth's introduction to the clan a little (okay, a lot) rockier. And I'm almost done with it. But after all that writing, I'm only 300 words beyond where my counter was a week ago.

So I'm revising my end-of-month goals somewhat. I originally wanted to be at 65K by tomorrow. As far as having written 15K in a month...including the tossed wordage would actually make that doable. But I'm looking at real progress on the story here, so no dice. I want 65K in MS form.

It would be impossible for me to write 6K in the next 24 hours, even if I took the entire day off and holed up in the library or Panera or wherever. So I'm giving myself to the end of the week to try and pull it off. That's 2 extra days, and I'll need about 2K per day. We'll see.

Friday I'm having (all 4 of) my wisdom teeth out. I'll be spending most of the day sleeping, which will serve the dual purposes of helping me recover from the surgery and this massive make-up push. Knowing that's coming will help me press on in the interim.

Having said that, though, I also know when I've reached the point of diminishing returns. Which is now. So rather than keep myself up for another 2 hours to get maybe a couple hundred more words (I've already managed over 1000 today, so I'm not slacking!), I'm going to bed so as to be refreshed and productive tomorrow.

Oidhche mhath.

P.S. - Less than two weeks until Fergus!