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Novel Day -135 (12,460 words)

I've been a very bad writer this week, averaging less than 200 words per day. I lost the initial momentum that piggybacked me up until the week before. A mixture of feelings and little happenings got in the way of writing. Things that I so want to use as excuses but there is no excuse good enough for the slumped labour. I got careless. But I have to admit this writing business is not easy on the guts. It is as lonesome as it gets. Everyday there's something that beckons you over to the other side of solitude. No sane man would want to live like this. Yet I'm not brave enough to stop. It got me wondering: Would my life be any less meaningful without this self-induced torment? And has this quest been an attempt to infuse meaning into a meaningless void all along? To be honest I don't have a definite answer. But I know I would have still been dreaming about writing had there not been certain recent incidents that rendered this next step necessary. Writing used to be hard.
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Novel Day -142 (11,490 words)

Last week's word count goes: 300 , 340 , 240 , 310 , 540 , and 90 . What's the matter with 90 words? Didn't try to cut corners but something happened in those 90 words that stopped me from writing on. The story took on a new possibility that was too unexpected to ignore. Surprising. But inevitable.
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Novel Day -148 (9,670 words)

Because I went away from everything and everyone else to the other side of city to write, I produced   1,270  words today. In the past twenty days I have been writing in parks, pubs, cafés, libraries, bookshops, on trams, the street and who remembers where else. In the past I wouldn't have believed that writing could become top priority to me as it is now. I can hardly believe it even as I'm doing it. But word count doesn't even begin to get to the meat of the story. The extremely low hit-to-miss ratio as you plough away with the pen in longhand, the little pleasure it derives when you do come across something remotely valuable, the ranges of emotional endpoints you have to reach and the prospect of myriad facts to get right in later drafts - all stack up to form a colossal task that's seemingly insurmountable. All the while you're hardly allowed any break, even as you're under constant suspicion that you're drawing from a very dry well. Because a man doesn&
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Novel Day -149 (extemporaneousness)

Life intervened. Today no writing done at all.
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Novel Day -150 (8,400 words)

Word count for the last three days are 340 , 600 , and 340 words. Nothing extraordinary produced. Just plain consistent pagefills. Encountered quite a few branch-out points from which more writing could, well, branch out. The psychology of the MCs (especially MMC) were really difficult to fit into the story, given the research. Not so much in the factual correspondence but in my own creative prolificacy. I'm not writing enough junk. That's the main obstacle now.
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Novel Day -153 (7,120 words)

Delved into MC's POV on N Days -155 and -154. Most of what was retrieved was iterations of previous revelations. Reaped more good stuff today though. Might be because I raised specific questions today to guide the writing. Liked the way new information materialized. Never could have consciously thought of this solution for the premise. Also worked on a one-sentence synopsis of the story, which fits perfectly into the current controlling idea. Perfectly might not mean the only fit. No don't go there. This fit is just fine.  300 , 510 , and 310 words respectively for the past three days.
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Novel Day -156 (6,000 words)

Can't say that the writing that came after identifying the protagonist was refreshing. Standard plot possibilities sprung naturally from the character including a few promising scenes, but nothing too exciting. No spine. I think that's what the story is still lacking. A specific action that weaves through and unifies the story. I'm still identifying the story on a macro level and though I know what the hero must do in this story, I haven't found out why exactly. Saying that defies what Mamet taught about backstory. Am I too timid to fight against Hollywood orthodoxy? 590 and 320 words in the last two days. So far 2.5 times more productive than planned.
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