Goodbye September, hello October (and hopefully cooler temperatures if the local weathermen aren’t making it up as they go again). Today was a day of pulling out words by the roots. Sometimes they flow. Sometimes you have to tease them out, and sometimes you have to go in after those suckers with a pickaxe and C-4 and tell yourself that you’ll clean everything up in the edit. Foo.

Today’s stats:

Started With: 23,021 words
Wrote: 3,043 words
Total word count: 26,064 words
What else did you do today, Nicola: Cat chores, cleaned up all kinds of cat vomit (what the heck is going on with them, I do not know), did knee PT workout, hit every poster on the Mid Week Tease and left comments on their teases, left answers for comments on my own tease, did promo blog posts for Deep Water in various groups on Facebook cooked lunch for Ramón and myself, made a skull necklace and bracelet, mailed out jewelry purchases and a new check for a bill because I’d forgotten to sign the first one, made dinner for Ramón and myself, and took a shower.

Writing Tips: Give yourself permission to write crap. Not every word that you write in the first draft will be gold. In fact, they’re going to be pretty shitty, with little glittering bits here and there that show promise. Think of it as digging clay out of a riverbank and slapping it into the general form of a person — the second/third/yadda yadda drafts are when you start carving everything into shape, adding stuff here and deleting stuff there. Sometimes deleting a lot of stuff there. Right now you’re not concerned with precision, or the perfect turn of phrase (although if you can manage those little glittering bits, please do so), or a gripping scene. You want shitty words that convey the general plotline of the story, and you want enough of them so that you make your word count. Do whatever you have to do to get them there — write a general outline that you’ll fill in later, skip ahead in the story, write something absolutely ridiculous that you know you’ll have to delete later but amuses you now. This is the time to get mud all over everything and build that castle.