Friday, June 10, 2005

Thursdays are my day OFF/WriterGirl Update

For the moment, so I spent it with a friend at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and made a point of going through the Quilts of Gee's Bend, one of the special exhibitions, while we were there.

Why are Thursdays my day off? Because I started writing this novel on a Saturday, and tended to really want to loaf by Thursday, so I made it my day off. It's summer break, I can do what I want.

Next week, that all changes. In fact, the novel, she is finished today, or maybe tomorrow morning, although gobs of finishing touches and editing are required. Like, replacing all the [V]'s and [T]'s and whatevers with actual NAMES of PLACES and CHARACTERS. Yeehaw. I just didn't want to get bogged down with the linguistics at the very beginning.

Thursdays being my day off, that meant no posts in the blog, since I was too tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk at said museum to follow the news and blog about it after I got home. I love the Boston MFA. We've been there twice and still barely scraped the surface. Yesterday we kept to all "dead white-guy pictures", as I like to put it, except for walking through the Oceania/African/Native section, where I got to see the COOLEST MAP EVER and decided I had to put it in my book, since I so-conveniently have a character more-or-less based on the Aleut in there.

So I did.

Said book is now 160 pages, at the time of this writing. About an hour ago I realized I'd been writing in Times New Roman and not Courier New, so I changed it and my pagecount jumped to over 200, which means, technically, I've written a 200-plus-page (that's 50K words) novel in three weeks, as opposed to a 160-page novel (40K) in three weeks. That's three weeks, tomorrow. I had a small heart attack at about that time and shakily put the font back to Times New Roman until I'm done with the last couple scenes, since I've been pushing myself in 10-page increments in that particular format. Figured I might as well keep to it, and then change at the end. Writers are like autistics, we need our little rituals.

Just a few more pages.

(Edited later: few more pages finished! I'll have gobs of editing to do, but the story is told.)

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