Larry M. Coleman

Day’s word count: 1976

Total word count: 3515

Writing location: home

Work: off

Exercise: none (not allowed to until tomorrow)

Notes

First time this month that I’ve surpassed the necessary words for the day. The writing is flowing well, especially under the constraints I’ve put myself under. Most of my writing is dialogue, but one of the things I’m trying is to write a book with as little dialogue as possible. So far, I’ve written over 3500 words and not a single line, but there are scenes that I would have written as dialogue otherwise.

Just for fun, I went back into my previous books and looked at how long before the first line of dialogue appeared:

• First book: third sentence
• Second book: 550 words (bottom of the first page)
• Third book: second paragraph
• Fourth book: The very first sentence. Then again, that one is intentional: “I hate books that start with ‘I’,” Eileen said. (I’m particularly proud of the opening line and the last line of this book because it opens with a self-referential joke about starting a book with ‘I’ and ends with “Once upon a time…”)
• Fifth book: 602 words (last line of first page)
• The Wind and the Shore: 579 words… and then the entire rest of the chapter except for six lines is all dialogue.