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Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Monday Mania

I don't know what it is about the first week after the holidays, but people go insane. Last week, it was a nice, quiet week. No phone calls, no requests that left me harried. Then, boom! I know a lot of people had last week off, but not everyone. (The airline industry is a 365 day a year operation.) So were these people just saving this stuff up, waiting for the new year?

From like 10:30 on yesterday I felt like I needed to hand out numbers, and of course, everyone needed their stuff ASAP. Sigh. On top of my usual lack of sleep on Sunday night and my killer headache (I still blame AC/DC), I was wiped out early. I ended up just heading for bed about 8:30.

I did, however, make progress yesterday with the demons. ;-) What I figured out as I lay in bed Sunday night turned out to work wonderfully and I made up the ground I lost over the weekend. Didn't gain any ground, which would have been nice, but after the day I had yesterday, I was satisfied. I'm hoping to do a few extra pages today. I know two more things I want to cover in this scene and I know--or I think I know--how I want to end this chapter.

What's hard to believe is looking at the calendar and realizing that in about a month, I should have the first draft done. =8-O If I stay on schedule. That would give me about five weeks to revise and I already know I'm going to have a lot of work to do. I'm actually looking forward to it, believe it or not, and for someone who normally hates revision, that's an interesting turn of events.

One of the things that's hard for me is I fall between two different kinds of writers. There is one type that revises as they go, and when they reach the end, they're done. I wish I could do that, but it's never going to happen. Things just pop up as I write that I don't know about at the beginning of the story and I have to revise to foreshadow them or to bring them in earlier. Or I just plain forget stuff. I have a pad of paper that I jot down notes to myself on as I go along of all the things I need to add and/or do on revision.

The second type of writer just spits out the first draft in a matter of weeks and then goes back and revises. I can't do that either. I do a lot of thinking as I write and I do a bit of revision as I reread a scene. I also do go back and revise if one of my writing buddies finds something that I consider major. That would be anything that would affect story structure or characters. I can't just spit out a draft in a matter of weeks. Actually, on a work day, 4 pages as a goal is really pushing it for me.

Normally, I try not to compare myself to other writers, but there's been a lot of chatter on a loop right now about exactly this, and since I don't fall into either camp, I'm freaking out every time I think about it. And I do mean freaking out to the point where I have to take deep breaths and tell myself the kind of things I said in this post. It's one thing to get it mentally, but apparently this is some emotional trigger thing. :-(

MN Weather Report: 14 degrees. Wind chill: 3 degrees. High Temp for the day: 18 degrees. Glaze ice/snow continues to cover neighborhood streets.