444 words

I have been crawling the last few days. I'm still in the middle of CHapter 10 -- my guy has just been snatched from the street where he was running away from the nasty one, who has slaughtered the Boss and his sidekicks, and I have to write two half-chapters of the nasty one being nasty and I hate that. In the previous attempt I just had my guy not narrate that. "I hate to thinkj about it --" what a cop out!

I don't think I'm really an extremely kind person, but I have inhibitions about cruelty, and I still haven't completely shakenm the atavistic, primitive superstition that what one writes becomes in a way real. But if all the sorcerer guys were like Meranda or the Boss, I don't think there'd have been a story. Without factional infighting I'd have had to invent an Act of God to get my guy out in the world, and then when they oicked him up again, they'd be sensible and gentle with him, and he'd have no reason to developo a will of his own.

I was up last night for hours -- I just had to pee, and then I couldn't sleep. So I'm going to take a nap now.

When I go back to work, the thing is to write at leat 1500 words of nastiness.

1251 words

Okay, it's going better now. The chapter's up to 2667 words (I think -- I forget those numbers as soon as I go to another window). My guy is all captured, shot in the leg, and being subjected to the nasty one's nastiness. And the byplay among the members of the nasty one's faction is telling bits of the backstory I hadn't told yet, so that's satisfying.

And now I have to go pick up the nice fellow from work.

Finished chapter 10

Also spent a big chunk of the afternoon waiting for my daughter's wrist x-ray. She has chronic arm pain -- or I should say recurring -- and I'm damned if she's going to end up impaired in the hands. Not while she has a mother. They wouldn't let us make an appointment, I don't know why, which meant that we had to sit around for an hour with unsuitable magazines (I know, I could have taken _Beginning Operations_, the first Sector General Omnibus, but I can be an idiot)

I ended up reading the September 2003 issue of San Francisco magazine. It was actually fascinating. It was for upper middle class people who had lost their high-rolling dot.com jobs, or who were in danger of losing their high-rolling dot.com jobs, or who hated their high-rolling dot.com jobs, or who felt guilty about making twenty times as much as their best friends from college, or were getting discriminated against because they're old. Such a morass of well-heeled anxiety. Makes me feel -- I don't know -- smug? for having been merely poor for so long.

In order to stop doing the arithmetic over and over, because I have a morbid fascination with numbers but I also can't bear them in mind for long, here's my running count:

Chapter 1 2150
Chapter 2 3070
CHapter 3 2588
Chapter 4 2707
Chapter 5 2412
Chapter 6 3213
Chapter 7 3008
Chapter 8 2572
Chapter 9 3361
Chapter 10 2778
so far -- 27859

According to my compromise formula (375 words per page) that's almost 75 pages.

Problem is I think I'm more than a third of the way through the story I have to tell. But I think at this stage I always think "oh hell, I've got a novella on my hands, not a novel," and a few months down the line I'm thinking "oh hell, I've got an encyclopedia on my hands."

We'll see.