Daily Words: +5024 (Over 121,000 words! … Only 12 Days Left!)

Well, after taking something like nine or ten days off again, I thought the curse was back. You know the one: It’s where I get to this point in the story, lose all faith in it, decide I’ve written it wrong or what have you, and I scrap the whole thing and start again. Only it doesn’t really happen exactly that way–no.

The first step is always just letting it idle for too long. Freeze up. Fail to write. Fail to push myself to get through the next scene. And then eventually it sits for so long that when I return to it, I convince myself there’s no going back into it where I left it, and I decide to start writing again.

Well, here I am again–a few pages beyond the highest page count I ever managed for this book. And I was frozen. Frozen by the idea that now I have to start bringing things to a close. I’ll be heading to the Maine woods at the end of the week to shut myself in a cabin with a typewriter and a few bottles of Jameson to do battle with the end of the book in style. This week is going to be a lot about getting myself to that final sequence. This past weekend, I struggled to get started. It was a real battle to get the words moving again. There was a lot of fear and doubt. I ended up actually breaking one of my own rules, going back, and rewriting two pages just to shut some of the criticisms in my head up.

Then I had a record day yesterday. 5000+ words.

Only 39,000 projected words to go. This is the most dangerous part of the climb.