A Week of Mondays – Day 3 #BehindtheBook

Day 3! Here we go!

Stats:

Date: 9/5/14

Words Written: 2622

Total Words to Date: 6477

Pages Written: 10

Total Pages To Date: 27

Chapters Completed: 2

Total Chapters to Date: 6

Time Elapsed: 3.5 hours

General Mood (1-10): 7

Notes:

Today was my best day so far, word-count wise, but my lowest “mood” rating. It’s not that I feel horrible about what I wrote today, I just wasn’t quite as ecstatic as I was the last two days. It felt a bit more like “work” today, laying groundwork, checking off items from my outline that I know have to be in the story. Not a ton of new stuff to discover today. That’s the fun part. Discovering/stumbling upon the stuff that’s not in the outline that really pulls the story together in a way you didn’t expect.

There’s a small plot element that appeared in one of my chapters today that I changed twice and am still not happy with. I’ll be coming back to that later, for sure. I also felt slightly less inspired to sit down and write today. I think it might be because I slept in about two hours later than I usually do. I find that the longer I go in the day without writing, the less I actually want to do it. So today, I was slow getting started and felt draggy in the writing as well.

There were definitely more brackets appearing today. Things like [add description here] or [extend dialogue]. This is what I do when I don’t feel like writing something at the moment but know that it needs to be there. So I put in these placeholders for myself and move on. It keeps me from getting too bogged down with things that I’m not inspired to do and helps push me forward and keep my momentum from dying.

In case you missed the first post, I’m live blogging (diary style) the progress of writing my new manuscript, A WEEK OF MONDAYS (which will be released by FSG/Macmillan in Spring 2016), to give fellow writers (and readers) an inside look into my writing process.

Click here to read the first post or you can follow all the posts by clicking here.