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Diminishing returns
Jun. 21st, 2006 12:08 pmDamn, I hate stopping.
This is conspicuous in other aspects - when I'm walking somewhere, I don't willingly stop en route, be it for a rest or a drink or a meal or whatever; I think this is one reason why I dislike picnics, because they tend to be a halt mid-journey - but it's especially true with work. It's about momentum, I think. I'd built up a real head of steam this last month: 150 pages, maybe fifty thousand words, and I was heading for the climax at a steady 2000 words a day. Haven't worked this well for years (I blame LJ - all these other writers dangling their good examples in public, what else can I do but join the stampede?).
But then, Monday, suddenly I had other things I had to do, and I only wrote a thousand words of the book; yesterday, only a page; today, a paragraph so far. It's about lost momentum; I'm just sitting here staring at it, doing nothing.
One of the Other Things was having friends for dinner last night: I made a sort of Spanish black bean stew, with pork and chorizo fresco, peppers and celery and baby onions. I liked that. It's not so much the cooking, it's the shopping & cleaning that eats time (I don't do much of either when I'm on a writing jag: it's an official excuse not to hoover).
More than that, though, I've been cutting the ghost story into shape for tonight. It's definitely called "Summer's Lease" now. I hacked three thousand words out of it in an hour, which was simple but not enough. Two hours with the manuscript on Monday and most of yesterday at the computer took out another thousand, and we are now officially in diminishing-returns territory. Half of me thinks I should still be picking at it, prior to the reading tonight; the heavier half asserts that while it is still too long, it's manageably too long now, and a cost/benefit analysis suggests the time would be far better spent elsewise.
Which would be fine, if I weren't just sitting here staring at things. I feel overwhelmingly tired, largely: underslept and overstretched and anxious about everything.
Barry's fine, though. Thanks for asking. Nice people gave him pork last night, and he knows where the magic pot is, that it came from...
This is conspicuous in other aspects - when I'm walking somewhere, I don't willingly stop en route, be it for a rest or a drink or a meal or whatever; I think this is one reason why I dislike picnics, because they tend to be a halt mid-journey - but it's especially true with work. It's about momentum, I think. I'd built up a real head of steam this last month: 150 pages, maybe fifty thousand words, and I was heading for the climax at a steady 2000 words a day. Haven't worked this well for years (I blame LJ - all these other writers dangling their good examples in public, what else can I do but join the stampede?).
But then, Monday, suddenly I had other things I had to do, and I only wrote a thousand words of the book; yesterday, only a page; today, a paragraph so far. It's about lost momentum; I'm just sitting here staring at it, doing nothing.
One of the Other Things was having friends for dinner last night: I made a sort of Spanish black bean stew, with pork and chorizo fresco, peppers and celery and baby onions. I liked that. It's not so much the cooking, it's the shopping & cleaning that eats time (I don't do much of either when I'm on a writing jag: it's an official excuse not to hoover).
More than that, though, I've been cutting the ghost story into shape for tonight. It's definitely called "Summer's Lease" now. I hacked three thousand words out of it in an hour, which was simple but not enough. Two hours with the manuscript on Monday and most of yesterday at the computer took out another thousand, and we are now officially in diminishing-returns territory. Half of me thinks I should still be picking at it, prior to the reading tonight; the heavier half asserts that while it is still too long, it's manageably too long now, and a cost/benefit analysis suggests the time would be far better spent elsewise.
Which would be fine, if I weren't just sitting here staring at things. I feel overwhelmingly tired, largely: underslept and overstretched and anxious about everything.
Barry's fine, though. Thanks for asking. Nice people gave him pork last night, and he knows where the magic pot is, that it came from...