Word count: 38,407.

Now that I’m back on track with my word count, there’s temptation to slack off a little. Knowing that I only need to do 1700 words a day and I’ll get to 50,000 words easily is making me a little complacent I think. Or at least a little distracted.

Maria and I went to a friends 30th birthday party for a BBQ today, so i didn’t get a chance to write through most of the day, but then when I did sit down to write, I kept finding my focus being pulled away to other things. I thought that doing 1700 words would be easy, but what should have taken only 1.5 – 2 hours had taken me the most part of the evening. It would certainly be easier if I just get the writing done, then I can get distracted with whatever I like without feeling guilty.

I had an interesting conversation today with a friend, Pete, who is a builder. He was asking how the writing was going, and I was telling him how last night I’d sat down and written out all the scenes I want to write, starting from the very last scene, then working out the scene before it, then the scene before that, etc until I’d reached the point in the story where I currently was. He said that approach was very similar in many ways to building a house. He said that in building, you design from the roof down, but build from the ground up. It makes sense that if you didn’t give any thought to the roof as you were building the rest of the house, you might end up with a structure that couldn’t support the roof’s weight. But once you’d designed with that goal, you had to lay all the foundations and build from the ground up.

I thought that was a really neat analogy for what I’d done with laying at the scenes…