I did a project on her in eighth grade and made a four-foot tall portrait of her created from a cardboard cut out and colored paper. She wore a yellow dress, and I made her 3D by curling two skinny strips at brown paper at her temples to match the hairstyles of the times. Or rather the hairstyles from the awesome movie.
I remember only a couple things from the actual biography I read. One was that her father was a writer too. The other was that she wrote the first part of Little Women between May and July. That's over 88K in six weeks. Throughout her life, she would enter periods of intense workdom like these, where her writing basically took over her life and wouldn't let her do anything else.
I totally understand that right now.
I think that I've been eating fairly normally, but I don't actually remember... Yikes.
I noticed the insomnia starting a few days after I arrived. I tried to ignore it, pretending that it was just the time change that was bothering my sleep pattern, but my thoughts moved quickly as I tossed and turned. This character will think this but say this; I need to plant this plot thread here; did this emotion come across too strong, ie. hit you over the head like a garbage truck/cliché?
Following the writing progress was easiest. (There's this handy little tool in Word called "Word Count"...) And thus, I'm happy to announce: I have written 20K in the last week. That's right - one week. Just to remind you: I wrote 11K in the month previous.
I'm even happier to announce that this means that just this very evening, I have finished the first draft of the novel I was working on, ie. the manuscript for which I signed a contract less than two weeks ago.
I'm 2K over the approximate word count. If I go by the rule that you should generally cut 10% of your first draft, and if I add a scene that I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have skipped, I'm guess that'll get me right to the target of 30K. :-P
Revisions shall commence next month. I want a few week's distance. It makes it easier to kill all those darlings that Mr. Faulkner once mentioned.
P.S. I thought about waiting until the morning to post this. You know, when I might actually be coherent. I couldn't wait. Excitement abounds!
