Tonight I wrote roughly a thousand words! I’m now on Chapter Seventeen, where, last week, I was stuck on Chapter Fourteen. The past few times I’ve sat down to write I’ve been doing all right. I’m not sure what’s making the difference. Well–one thing that does help is that I’m trying really hard to make sure that I stop with some idea of what happens next, and write that as a sentence at the end of the document. I’m also trying really hard to resist the constant whisper of “that sucks.” I’m leaving dialogue untagged knowing I’ll come back and tag it later (I know I actually WILL do that, unlike some things that I say I’ll do later and then never do). I don’t feel like I am plunging ahead blindly, even though I do feel a little blind, it’s not the wreckless, I-really-have-no-clue feeling of before. It’s more a slight uncertainty that I might not be doing exactly the right thing yet.

I’ve been fighting against the tendency of my brain to judge “lack of something potential” as “failure.” Ie., just because I’ve not yet gotten something that COULD happen, doesn’t mean that I won’t ever.

I also wrote a rambling, fun thing for Re-Vamp, which I look forward to continuing at some point.

When I chop things up I try to remember to either keep an old version or take the snippets and dump them into a word doc for snippets. Sometimes I’ll end up with quite a few snippet files, or sometimes I end up with a very long word document. But I think it’s worth keeping them. Every once in a while I’ll get to a place where I’ll be like “Ohhh, now, that snippet I cut out of Chapter two could really work here!” And more often than not, it’s true–I liked what I’d written for a reason, but maybe the timing wasn’t right, maybe later I’ll figure out when the timing *is* right.

Today I have no idea how many words I wrote because I ended up using a few snippets I’d cut out of an earlier version of a scene just before. So I’ll just give a more general wordcount: 45,249. The other day I found an old journal entry where I’d written out these summaries of various stories, given the start date and the wordcount at the time. The Red Box was at 35k; it was June or July.

True, 10,000 words in six months isn’t much. But it’s more than I thought I’d written. Especially considering at the beginning of this renewed effort on the story, I was barely at 40k, maybe just under it.

It’s pretty cool, sometimes, to look up and realize you’ve come a lot farther than you thought.