Biggest Writing Day

Sat down today to write trying to be strict with myself.  Whenever I stood for any reason or did anything other than writing, I refused to count the time toward my 50-hour goal.  After I finished, I had 3 1/2 hours under my belt for the day, my best day this month.

As I see it now, I failed to notice that I was actually making two goals.  The obvious one was to write 50 hours of fiction.  So far, I am almost at the halfway point with 23 hours and 45 minutes completed.

To be on pace to hit 50, I should be at 21 hours and 40 minutes.  So I'm doing all right on that front.

The other goal was the match beer consumption with my writing.  The so-called "beer-hour."  That goal was going jusssst fiiiiiine . . . until I went to the pool party at the Hilton on Thursday night.

So now I really have to focus on finishing 50 hours this morning or the whole thing will be a big bucket of failure.

On the bright side, while writing chapter 2 I started working on a character that I really like.  The best part is I'm not sure whether this guy is good or evil or neutral.  I like not knowing.

Oh, and I saw a movie called "Arbitrage" starring Richard Gere.  Quite a good flick!  Without a doubt, it was the best movie that has been in the UAE since early September.  Then again, that's not saying much.

Polishing Off Chapter One

As you might already know, I have the goal of writing fiction for 50 beer-hours this month.  Just to give a brief update, I have finished chapter one for the most part and am just polishing a bit here and there.

Here's where I stand for the month:

10/1: 2 hours of writing (2 beers consumed)
10/2: 1 hour (0 beers)
10/3: 2 hours (0 beers)
10/4: 3 hours (3 beers)

10/5: 3 hours (4 beers)

10/6: 2 hours (2 beers)

Total: 13 hours (11 beers)

I ended up writing 10 hours over the four-day weekend, which puts me ahead of schedule.  If I average a few minutes over an hour and a half per day for the last 25 days, I'll hit my goal.  At that time, I'll probably be in the neighborhood of 15,000 words into the story, which would probably be three chapters.

It is a fantasy novel, even though I've read less than a dozen of them in my life.  And lots of people die in it.  Lots and lots.  I might set the record for fictional deaths in a fantasy novel.  Sometimes I start a sentence intending to talk about what a character is eating for breakfast; by the end of the sentence, he has been gutted.  Okay, none of this stuff about characters dying is true.  Fiction is teaching me to lie more.

Two Hours, Two Beers

In my last post, I mentioned that I had a single goal for October--writing fiction for 50 hours.  Each hour I finish earns me one beer.  Here's my update for Day 1:

Progress: 2 / 50 hours

I like how I've started.  I feel sluggish trying to use my imagination as much as the story requires.  I hope it's just the result of using a mental muscle that I rarely use.  I'm hoping things will get easier as time goes on.  Still, my mind feels fried.

Combined with my single, solitary hour of fiction writing from September, I am now a hair over 1,000 words into my story, with an average of about 330 words an hour, give or take.  It's going to be a long, long, long story, I think.  I'm not sure if I want to post any of it.  What do you think?  Is it a good idea to put a work in progress on a blog?

In any case, I like it so far.  And time goes pretty fast while I'm doing it.  So that's good, I guess.  Seems like the big issue with me is getting my ass into a chair, clicking Microsoft Word, and typing--instead of playing games, looking for new music, answering emails, checking facebutt, etc.  My battle against laziness will be a life-long one.

Hey, but here's a bonus.  My mind is so warped right now that the beer I am drinking--numero uno for the month--is already having an effect.  Value added plus one.

October Goals, in Which I Invent the Beer-Hour

I had planned to pursue goals in September.  I had put up a post about it here, in which I gave a list of five goals of varying difficulty for the month.  Almost instantly after clicking the "Publish" button, I found that I could not pursue those goals for a couple of reasons.  At the time, I wrote that I would put off those goals until October.

Now that October is upon us, I figured that I would revise my goals a bit.  I still plan to have goals for October--well, one goal.  That will be the change.  Instead of a bunch of easy or medium-difficulty goals, I figured that I would aim my sights at one tough goal.

Write 50 hours of fiction during October

That would work out to 1.6129 hours per day, or about one hour and 37 minutes daily.

My original goal would have been 10 hours or so.  After all, I only wrote 1 hour of fiction (or non-blog material) last month.

From one hour to 50.  A big part of me thinks that it is not going to happen.  A big part of me thinks that I need some extra motivation to pursue this goal.

Thus the idea of the "beer-hour."

The concept of the beer-hour is simple: Every time I write one hour of fiction, I can drink one beer.

The beer-hour is an earn-as-you-go system.  If I write zero hours, I can drink zero beers.

When Monday rolls around, I already know how it is going to go.  I'm going to come home from work, get work emails out of the way--at which point I will notice how tired I am--and then start to have what I like to call "Beer Thoughts."

However, I won't have written anything by then.  So I'll have to go back to my laptop, scribble for an hour--or five, depending on my needs--before I can do anything about it.

Naturally, this writing goal is going to absorb a lot of the time that I normally set aside for blogging, games, downloading music, and reading.  And so while I will keep up with Band Wars 2, I will do so at a much slower pace.  For October, at least.