Forward Progress

Here's the tally for yesterday (Monday):

New pages written: 7 (goal: 6.4 pages)
Old pages revised on paper: 0
Pages of revisions typed in: 0
Pages lost or gained due to revisions: 0
Total page count to date: 114 (goal: 200 pages)
Days remaining until D-day: 36

Emails from editor in UK: 0
Emails from agent in NY: 1 (Not about this book or the contract)

Chocolate consumed: Two handfuls of Darth mix of M&Ms
Junk food consumed: None. (Just realized I didn't really each much today. No wonder I'm hungry.)
Exercise: None
Television watched: Attack of the Clones with my sick son
Pictures of Hayden downloaded: None. (But I got to seem him in the above movie. Sigh.)
Tears: Yes (A new category. I will only count tears that fall due to writing frustration/anger/despair. Lack of writing time, too.)

Okay. All is not lost. I finally made some forward progress today even with a sick kid at home and my youngest one who made her day's goal to annoy him. The kids had a lightsaber fight with Crayola makers at one point. But I had to stop it before one of them (namely my son) got hurt. My 2 1/2 year old, a Yoda fan, has the light saber sounds down pat.

To soothe the day and make it easier on myself, I bought the Star Wars Ep. 2 DVD this morning. I sat on the couch with my son, who now has two ruptured eardrums, and my trusty Alphasmart. I had to stop working every time Kit Fisto (my son's fave) appeared on screen, but that was okay and he loved pointing him out to me. I must admit to being more than a little distracted each time Anakin was onscreen, but I managed to meet my page goal thanks to my muse providing much needed inspiration as well as a new resolve not to go to bed until I've met my page quota.

This means I have now entered into panic mode as well as the dove head first into the hate portion of my love-hate relationship with writing. I love having written. I hate writing. Those blank screens/pages just mock me which is why I use my Alphie to draft. With only a four line display, there's not much to mock. I don't draft on my computer. Otherwise my poor keyboard takes take the brunt of my frustration. And nothing, including molded plastic and circuits, deserves that.

Focus, I must, and concentrate on the task at hand. A complete rough draft. A complete rough draft. That's my mantra and goal for the next two weeks.

One more thing, I'm going back to linear writing for a few days. I've been jumping around as the scenes hit me, but I need to know I have all the parts of the story down. So I started back at Chapter Four today and filling in the gaps. We'll see how long this lasts. I'm guessing until I get into Chapter 5. It never fails. I always hit a wall there. A huge I'm-never-going-to-be-able-to-muddle-through-the-middle wall-everything-I-wrote-sucks wall. I'll need lots of M&Ms when that happens and Kleenex.