Day’s word count: 1089
Total word count: 1089
Writing location: BUF/JFK
Work: 5:30 p.m. – midnight
Exercise: 45 minutes of weights
Notes
Over a thousand words on the first day. You can look at this two ways: I’m already almost 600 words in the hole, or I’ve already got my first 1000 in the book.
I’m going to look at it as a win because in addition to trying to make this year’s challenge as hard as possible for myself, I decided to use this month to learn Scrivener by using it for the very first time. So that ate up a couple of hours of time I could have used to write.
When I was writing today, it was going well. Or, I should say, the words were coming easily. The biggest problem is finding Richard’s voice. He’s a retired athlete and while he’s intelligent, he’s not literary. (He has excellent taste in movies, but has never been a reader of much that wasn’t nonfiction.) Eileen was easy to write because she is super-literary, so when she sounds literary, it’s because that’s who she is. Richard isn’t, but he still sounds like he is. I’m just going to keep chugging along until I find what sounds right for him. That might not even be until the first draft is over.
One of the things I realized the other day is that Richard’s memoir will probably sound much different than Eileen’s because they’re written from different worldviews due to their genders. Eileen’s had so many other characters in it because as a woman, the people around her are as big a part of her world as herself. Richard, being a man, has a focus more on what he did rather than the people he did it with. This wasn’t intentional, but I think it’s a good sign.
Tomorrow I’ll be at work for 13 hours, so if I get anything at all written, it will be a minor miracle. The next day is the same. Then a stretch of five days off. November isn’t supposed to be easy.
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