I Will Not Be Called a Braggy Pants This Week

At TARA, we started the 100 x 100 challenge on September 3rd. The object is to write at least 100 words each day for 100 days, with the ultimate goal of completing That Damned Manuscript in time for our annual holiday party in December. As noted in my previous blog entry, I have to write at least 1,000 words every day if I hope to complete TDM by that time.

One hundred words is really nothing. I rarely write fewer words than that when posting on the various forums and message boards where I’ve been known to goof off when I should be writing a book. I’ve written more than a hundred words here already.

Here is my progress for the first week:

Day 1- 2,444 words. YAY!

Day 2 - 1,629 words. I am the Word Goddess!

Day 3 – 1,741 words. It’s true what Mr. Lucky once told me many years ago, when he first fell in love with me. Yes, I am hot stuff.

Day 4 – 418 words. What can I say? It was Saturday, and obviously I get more done when Baby Bear is in school.

Day 5 – 100 words. And that’s an estimate. I went back over what I’d written so far, and started tinkering, and before I knew it, I was cutting stuff and completely lost track of the initial word count. I know I wrote at least 100 new words, possibly as many as two hundred, but I can’t swear to it. It didn’t help that my eleven year old and forty-three year old were fighting over the TV most of the day.

Day 6 – 282 words. By now I was officially in full-fledged “this story isn’t going to work” mode—the same mode that’s led to so many previous false starts this year. Having just e-mailed the first chapter to my critique partner, Jean, I felt I was now committed to writing this book all the way through—but I didn’t know where to go from here. At this point, the story could be easily resolved in Chapter 2. Not to mention there was zero chemistry between the hero and heroine. And I got no sympathy at all from Drill Sergeant Phyllis, who said, “If you had an amazing word count EVERY day, we’d just call you a braggy pants.”

Alas, the Word Goddess is but a mere mortal, who has to pick up other people’s stinky socks and unwad them before tossing them into the washer.

I was so frustrated and panicked by this morning—Day 7—that I actually resorted to the unthinkable: I cleaned the house!

Maybe it was the fumes from the Tidy Bowl cleaner, or maybe it was when I hit my head on the chandelier and had ghastly visions of chucking the whole writing thing and applying for one of those career opportunities at Wal-Mart, but somehow the solution came to me, and by this afternoon I was rewriting Chapter 2 and feeling as if this story might be crazy enough to work.

Day 7 – 1,314 words. Not bad.

Only 79,000 words to go.