Larry M. Coleman

Day’s word count: 2561

Total word count: 18,473

Writing location: home

Work: off

Exercise: 16.1 mile (45m) ride on Rouvy

Notes

Knocked out a good chunk today (5% of the book written in one day!) and came in with my second-highest word count day so far. Since this year, I’m experimenting, I did something I never do and wrote a paragraph that’s almost entirely stream of consciousness. It starts inside his head in the usual first person, then dips into second person (which I’ve also never written in) for what looks like an aside, then stays in what looks like second person but is obviously a thinly-veiled first person retelling of thoughts so painful he can’t address them in first person and can’t stop them rushing out once the dam breaks, then snaps right back into the regular narrative with one harsh break of the fourth wall like the slamming of a door behind him.

One of the sentences is 528 words long. It’s not the sort of thing I plan on doing a lot of, or even again in this book. One paragraph like that is enough for an entire book, and the paragraph does serve a purpose. It comes pretty early in the book when he’s talking about the fun times he had as a child with his first bicycle, and then he starts an innocent digression of a memory of him and his father then and then slides into a massive text wall that makes it evident that he’s still got some major unresolved issues from the trauma he suffered starting not long afterward. After that, the point is made, and if I was a reader instead of the writer, the first time I came across a paragraph like this, I would say, “Damn, that’s horrible for Richard,” but the second time I came across it, I’d say, “Damn, this book is horrible.”