Guilt the Obscure

This week's writing:

July 12: 209 words
July 13: 670 words
July 14: 1,993 words
July 16: 1,082 words
July 17: 2,879 words

Weekly total: 6,833

Anyone who's taking notes at home will quickly come to the conclusion that over the last 10 weeks, this week has been my most productive.

A quick summary:

Week 1: 2,432 (or 3,532 - I'm not entirely sure how to count this week, because I also wrote a short Hall-related fiction piece, which technically counts as writing, but has nothing whatsoever to do with this novel)
Week 2: 855
Week 3: 3,000
Week 4: 2,417
Week 5: 2,234
Week 6: 1,658
Week 7: 2,578
Week 8: 4,106
Week 9: 2,441
Week 10: 6,833

for a ten week total of 28,554 words (or 29,654) which is about 58 pages. (2,855 word average per week)

My word goal has been 2,000 words per week and I've missed it twice in ten weeks. I've been considering pushing it up a bit to 2,500 words per week (an extra page) and I'm going to do that.

I still haven't written an outline for this novel yet, although I'm pretty sure of the events of the next 2 chapters. After that, it gets a little fuzzy again. I keep putting off drawing up an outline because I know - know, mind you - that when I have an outline, I tend to write all out of order, so some things end up being continuity issues, which is very annoying to try and go back and edit out. Also, near the end of the novel, I end up having avoided all the hard spots to write, which is just thrilling to go back and try and fill in later.

I actually wrote this novel before, for the NaNoWriMo thing in November. I got about 70,000 words done, which were almost entirely total crap. The thing read like a bad mixing of Chronicles of Riddick and EarthSea (the mini-series, not the novels). When my computer crashed earlier this year, I lost it, since I'd never posted it or shared it with Liz. I tried to tell myself this really wasn't a big loss, but it sort of was.

It took me quite a while to recover from it - I hadn't been writing much of anything else. In talking to Liz a few months back, I decided to give it a go again, and obviously it's been going.

Which is why I'm trying to figure out how come I still feel sort of obscurely guilty.

I had a fantastic week this week, I got over three times my word goal done. I finished Chapter Five, started and finished Chapter Six, and got a good go at Chapter Seven. I had some revelations about my Bad Guy (who really is quite vile) and developed my heroine's character.

(In the middle of this, I also read the entire Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, dealt with the baby of hives - who still has them, and I wish the pediatrician would call me back, played a lot of Warcraft, had the deviants over two nights in a row, yelled at JD about posting Harry Potter spoilers and have mostly been coping with a personal issue that I don't want to talk about right now, sorry. So it's not like my real life has been quiet or anything.)

So... I wonder why it is that it seems no matter what I do, how hard I work, or anything that I accomplish, I never feel happy with myself as a writer?

Posted by tisfan at July 18, 2005 09:03 AM