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Infirm of Purpose
Aug. 20th, 2007 12:34 pmOooh. *holds head*
Slept crap last night, and feel crap this morning. Spent my usual hour sitting here trying to work, by the end of which I'd read a lot of LJ and I think deleted one punctuation mark.
Then I had to go into town (bread! must buy bread! - what morbid paranormal creature is it, whose existence is dependent on baked goods?), so I thought maybe I'd declare this a day off and spend my home-time reading, cooking, resting, maybe a little desultory cleaning...
And yet, and yet. Here I am back home again, back at my desk again, trying again. Thing is, I have Momentum, and I really don't want to give it up. I haven't been talking metrics over here much, because I've been posting daily totals over on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
novel_in_90, but I'm just coming up on three-quarters of a book here, and those major waymarkers are really useful as an incentive. 'Specially here, at the back end of the middle, just coming into the final bend. See, when you start a book, you pass a whole lot of markers rat-a-tat: 10%! 20%! 100 pages! A quarter! A third! - which feels like a whole lot of book already. But then it's a wearisomely long uphill drag from a third to the great peak of the halfway point, with nothing useful to alleviate it - nobody gives any credence to two-fifths, and 40% just means "damn, still a long way short of the half..."
And then of course it's just exactly as far from the half to two-thirds, which is (one reason) why the middle of a book is such a gruelling strain. But then, rat-a-tat: two-thirds! Three-quarters! Only a hundred pages to go! And so on, the great canter home.
And I really don't want to lose that sense of rush, now that I've hauled this sledge through the vast and bitter landscape of the mid-book; so not a day off, seemingly.
Except of course that I'm sitting here writing LJ, rather than writing book. Hrrmph...
Slept crap last night, and feel crap this morning. Spent my usual hour sitting here trying to work, by the end of which I'd read a lot of LJ and I think deleted one punctuation mark.
Then I had to go into town (bread! must buy bread! - what morbid paranormal creature is it, whose existence is dependent on baked goods?), so I thought maybe I'd declare this a day off and spend my home-time reading, cooking, resting, maybe a little desultory cleaning...
And yet, and yet. Here I am back home again, back at my desk again, trying again. Thing is, I have Momentum, and I really don't want to give it up. I haven't been talking metrics over here much, because I've been posting daily totals over on
novel_in_90, but I'm just coming up on three-quarters of a book here, and those major waymarkers are really useful as an incentive. 'Specially here, at the back end of the middle, just coming into the final bend. See, when you start a book, you pass a whole lot of markers rat-a-tat: 10%! 20%! 100 pages! A quarter! A third! - which feels like a whole lot of book already. But then it's a wearisomely long uphill drag from a third to the great peak of the halfway point, with nothing useful to alleviate it - nobody gives any credence to two-fifths, and 40% just means "damn, still a long way short of the half..."And then of course it's just exactly as far from the half to two-thirds, which is (one reason) why the middle of a book is such a gruelling strain. But then, rat-a-tat: two-thirds! Three-quarters! Only a hundred pages to go! And so on, the great canter home.
And I really don't want to lose that sense of rush, now that I've hauled this sledge through the vast and bitter landscape of the mid-book; so not a day off, seemingly.
Except of course that I'm sitting here writing LJ, rather than writing book. Hrrmph...