Forcing yourself to write

Skipped the workshop tonight. Wasn't feeling it. Lack of sleep and sporatic nosebleeds made me rethink going.

Did over 3000 words today. Feels good, man.

When life gets in the way

Yesterday sucked with doctor's appointments and trips to the pharmacy.  I was determined to get some writing done today in spite of feeling like crap.  Almost 2500 words today.  Yay me!  I might even get more done tonight.

At a Loss for Words

In my zeal to keep writing, I'm writing on both my desktop and my laptop.  The problem is one is PC and the other is a Mac, respectively.  In addition, I haven't figured out how to save drafts from my PC anywhere other than locally.  I can't see the iCloud from my PC.  I'm using Scrivener, which I like a lot, but I dislike that the PC version hasn't caught up to the Mac version.

So as a result of multiple drafts, I lost about a 1000 words.  I looked through all previous iterations and I saw that my most recent saves had been corrupted.  I had somewhere to go and I decided to just rewrite that section.  What other choice did I have?  The other good thing with having multiple copies and versions there were some earlier chapters that were just gone so I was able to recover those as well.  What sucked was that the missing chapter seemed to be filled with a blank unicode text that I couldn't access.  So it was still there, kinda, but just out of reach.

Anyway, the main elements were still fresh in my head so I was able to crank out over 1000 words in an hour and a half.  I don't know if that is super impressive, but it goes to show that the clearer you are in knowing what you want to say, the faster you can proceed.  I think that applies to most things, not just writing.

Also, again, nothing beats research.  There's nothing better than going to an environment where your characters are going to interact and thinking about their reactions to the location.  I didn't want to bring my laptop with me so I emailed my thoughts to myself.  I also found a new location to set up a scene that I hadn't considered before.  That was a fortuitous surprise.

I'm looking foward to this afternoon when I can make those thoughts congeal.

Authenticity

So I'm working on a novel about a killer and I realize that I feel pretty fake writing about some scenes, specifically the ones about firing a rifle.  To that end, I decided to go to a local gun range.  I thought I would look at guns that were available for purchase, try and get inside my protagonist's head.  Fortunately, there was a gun range and I was able to rent a rifle and shoot.  I had shot guns before, but they were semi-automatics.  I hadn't ever fired a bolt action rifle.

I was fortunate to get set up with Garrett, an Iraq war veteran who showed me how to properly stand and fire the gun.

I think I did fairly well considering this was my first time.  I opted not to get a crazy paper target like a zombie or something.  I just chose a simple target and went for it.

The place had advertising on the street where you could fire a machine gun which is why I suspect most of the people were there.  Some retired looking guys were kind enough to take my picture.  However the bullet holes in the target didn't show up very well with my black jacket behind it.

I went home and took a better shot of the target with some light behind so you can see the center mass grouping of the shots.  

All in all, I thought it was a good research trip.  I saw some knives and I almost bought one, till I saw the price.  Other than that, there isn't anything better than actually doing some research and taking trips to where the story is taking place and experiencing it as the character.  If you have the means, I highly suggest doing it.  That's not to say that you can't completely fabricate a location based on an amalgamation of your memories.  That's totally possible.  I've done it and hopefully, it's convincing enough to the reader.

Word Count

Currently my word count is about 1500 words a day.  I think I could jack that up further if I avoid editing as I go along.

I feel tempted to write scenes on from my other outlines, but I think I must make getting the first book out the door the priority.  When I first started my word count was at about 4000 per day.  But I think the issue more than anything is time management.

I will write at least another 1000 words after the kids go to bed tonight.