The Easy Part, the Hard Part

This time last week I was in panic mode. 50 pages, two weeks, how was I ever going to pull it off? Tonight, after averaging out pretty well on my 3.25 pages a day goal, I sit at 33 pages of rough draft.

My many years of English Majoring are paying off. All that paper writing (usually at the last minute) has gotten me pretty practiced at producing quickly. I've had lots of practice getting my thoughts in gear fast and, thanks to typing classes in middle school, my fingers are good at keeping up.

All the time spent working on Oracle is paying off, because through it I finally got a feeling for how to write the pacing and general architecture of a novel.

My many, many blog posts on my bar blog gave me architecture for writing bar scenes, and since I'm so practiced with that kind of tone, the bar scenes are proving easy to write out.

Then, there's the part where my procrastination means I have to write a few pages every day or face sad, sad defeat. The upshot of this is that it's gotten me into a rhythm, it's built momentum.

Of course, those are the easy bits.

There are hard bits too. Thanks to the pace at which I'm writing, my rough draft is pretty sketchy. I already have scenes I know I'll have to go back and flesh out before Monday, which will take more time on top of the pure hit-50-pages time, though it'll also add a few pages to my final count.

The worst, and most unexpected part, is that while I'm having such an easy time writing the bar stuff, I'm having a hard time writing the stuff where the main character is not at the bar. The bar's easy, so many coworkers and/or customers to play Jess off of. Once she's clocked out, I start coming up blank. A little problem, to say the least, and I've got a very limited amount of time to solve it.