Of Water Heaters and Productivity...

The water heater lives!

I ventured bravely into the cluttered and scary depths of the garage and had a long talk with it about how things needed to be. We cried a little (well, that was mostly me), had a few laughs, and agreed that we'd both try harder to fix our relationship.

It seems to be working. Either that or the two plus hours my swearing husband spent in there on Saturday with his manly-man tools making ungodly noises and frightening the children was productive.

But that's (presumably) not why you're here.

Chapters Two and Three are completely finished, printed, three-hole punched and in a binder sitting prettily on a shelf, not to be tinkered with again until it's time for the first revision, unless at some point I lose all willpower and start tweaking madly with them.

Yesterday I had a beautiful stretch of alone time in the house- just me, The Beast*, our pet fishies, and the laundry piles calling out my name. After I finished Chapter Three, stretched and switched loads, I was ready to keep writing. The problem was, I didn't have any more scenes to remove from the 8.5 x 11 page and tape to the shelf edge directly over where I plug in my laptop at my desk. I actually growled. So I decided to try out an experiment for the sake of productivity and flow, given that I am way behind on my master plan and do not like growling.

I have been writing the scene by scene description for each chapter after finishing writing the previous one. Yesterday I wrote the scene by scenes for four chapters (4,5,6 & 7), and piled them on the shelf. Now I can just keep grabbing, cutting, taping and writing until the whole stack is gone. In theory it sounds great- let's just see if it works.

The Beast has now grown from the original plan of 20 to 22 chapters, and I'm guessing it might end up at 25 before the I'm done. The chapters are averaging about 3000 words each so far, which looks/feels about right. That keeps me in range for the 60,000-80,000 words. The characters decided they were not 10 year old kids- they're 12 or 13. Still deciding on that one, but it got me past the temporary "something doesn't feel quite right" freeze on Thursday and Friday.

I refuse to panic about the deadline until March arrives. Onwards and upwards.

*I still haven't decided on a title yet.