Goals and Goblins

I finally crossed the theoretical three-quarters mark in the first draft yesterday. Yay me!!! 60k down, approx. 20k to go. Shit. That's still quite a ways to go.

I wish I was one of those fab jackrabbit writers, the kind that can sit down and pound out a first draft in two months or less. But I'm not. I'm an agonizer, a double-thinker, a perfectionist. I'm working on that. And it's a good thing, 'cause the first few chapters? They're pretty damn cringe-worthy.

Setting goals is a good thing for me - as long as I'm willing to move the goal posts early and often. I started out with the (for me anyway) ambitious goal of 2k words per day. And it worked. For a few weeks. And then it didn't. So I said to myself, "Self, you're freaking out. Let's do 1k a day." So I did, and it went swimmingly for about a month. And then I got stuck. I wrote an emotionally tough scene and my mc stopped talking to me. (No, I'm not crazy - at least, not like that - I know it comes from me...oh, never mind, either you get it or you don't.) Anyway, for two weeks I had nothing. It totally sucked. Back on schedule again, but sometimes I could only get a few words down. Then another stoppage - more of a crisis of confidence because I hadn't the foggiest idea of what was going to happen next. As in no clue at all. And that was kind of scary. No story, movie, song, whatever is as scary as my mind's ability to mess me up. But the past few weeks (before and after TFest) I've been working pretty steadily and got a little over 10k done. Not much by jackrabbit standards, but pretty damn good for Angie standards.

And that's pretty much how my process has been. So today, I'm still going "wahoo!" I'm also wondering what the hell's going to happen next. I'm getting a little more comfortable in the land of "I don't know," though. Still freaks me out, but sometimes it's good to get freaked. Right? Right!