SUNDAY NOVEMBER 1st

"Day One"


7:54 AM

Woke early with a mild hang-over. Feeling optimistic. I still don't know what the novel is going to be about. I'll start the morning out with some brain-storming/inspiration-mapping and see where it goes. My first write-in is over at Cal-Tech from 10-2 PM, where I'll get to meet some fellow novel writers.

Don't want to spend all day on this though - there's a lot to do before I skip town. My goal is to hit my 2000 word goal by lunchtime.

9:38 AM

Starting is hard! I started by jotting down ideas, and about half of them suddenly seemed so cliche to me - like, "that's from Star Wars, that's from Lord of the Rings, that's from Harry Potter. There's so much pressure on that first page, it feels like the foundation, which you're going to build this whole thing on. I gave myself permission to write passages out of order - so I can move today's writig to the middle and come up with a new beginning down the line, if need be.

Brainstorming was starting to feel pretty abstract, and Inspiration wasn't striking, so I just started writing to see what came out. (One of the mains points of this is to push through perfectionism and other forms of writer's block, and just let the creativity flow). So I've got someone named Anka with blistered feet traveling through the desert by foot.

I feel like I'm totally procrastinating by writing this blog entry. I'm going to head over to the write-in at Cal Tech and hunker down. 255 words written, 1745 words to go...

3:54 PM -

Reaching my quota by lunch turned out to be pretty unrealistic, mostly because It took a while for me to even figure out what was going on. I have three characters crossing a treacherous desert, delivering a piece of forbidden, alien technology from their village to the city, from which their tribe was exiled 50 years before.

So far so good. It's rough but I like the world I'm creating.

Total word count for the day: 2058

47942 words to write...