15,000 words

At the moment I have 15,000 words (however MS Word calculates such). Which means a)I’m on track for my revised schedule and b)I did 3500 words today. 3500 words is (at 250 per page) 14 pages, which means that mentally I am not at top form at the moment. Darin graciously took the kids all day so I could write.

Vomiting out a vast quantity of words produces strange side effects. One of the main ones at the moment is that I really, really want to write a potboiler. You know: one of those novels with glitzy settings filled with beautiful people wearing designer clothing and having sex a lot. (The über-example of the genre is Lace by Shirley Conran. The famous first line is “Which one of you bitches is my mother?” Which you have to admit would probably get you to read at least a paragraph or two.) I don’t know why I’d want to write a book like that; I don’t read them all that often, and when I do I’m invariably disappointed. Not sexy enough or not well-written enough or what I can’t tell you. Of course, quite possibly I can’t tell you because I may not have any words left in me at the moment.

(Let’s see. If I wanted to produce a 200,000 word doorstop every year and I took 50 weeks of the year to do it, that would be 4000 words a week or 800 words per weekday. At 250 words per page, that’s only 3 pages per day, with weekends off! Of course, you’re probably contracted to write more than that, which means pretty soon you’re farming out to subnovelists, and let’s not even think about rewrites.)

Anyhow, it’s enough for right now that I’m writing. And most of the time it’s fun, even though the Censor sits on my shoulder and says, “Good lord, this is awful, you know that, right?” and “Gosh, you wasted an awful lot of time outlining to no avail.” I try not to listen to that voice too often. I have too many words to write in the next 17 days.