I need to learn to stop sacrificing sleep ...

[jedibuttercup]

It just tends to be the first thing to go when Main Job + Part Time Work + Family + { WRITING PROJECT } stack up beyond what the regular hours in the day will hold. I really should have started earlier on my extreme_bigbang ... *yawn*

37052 / 100000 words. 37% done!

It has to be to 60% by April 11. I think I can? *cracking knuckles* So far, for this story, I have:

1. Rewatched fifty hours plus of Falling Skies canon;
2. Quoted Pride and Prejudice, General Patton, Watership Down, and Albert Einstein;
3. Took a swipe at conjugating Latin, then backed away slowly (ugh, the tenses);
4. Reread the Mayan creation myths again;
5. Google-Mapped a bunch of backroad routes all over South Carolina;
6. Researched school colors for a particular town along those routes;
7. Asked my mom what her farmer-grandparents in the South would've had in their pantry;
8. Saved the life of one person so far that Spielberg killed off (many more to come!);
9. Gleefully used the term "BFG" in a weapon-related context; and
10. Included more sex and cursing than in all my stories last year together (which, granted, isn't saying much).

*wipes brow* When it's finished, if I get it finished, it'll be the longest single fic I've ever written in one go (though LM is longer as a series, and BAH will probably surpass it, when complete). Heck, the only story I've previously published all at once that was longer than what I've written for this just so far was its prequel; the next one down was that 30,000 word Eureka time loop big bang, I think. I'm sort of torn whether to be proud of that, since once again I'm burying myself in a rarepair story in a rare fandom that's not likely to attract much attention, and has already garnered me several RL comments of "but why put that much effort into it? why not a real novel?"

.... *sigh* Because! *shaking head with a smile*

Comments

[graycardinal]

I got my first look at this post on my smartphone, and I am going to blame the small screen size for my initial misread of the subject line. (A nickel says you can see this one coming: my first reading saw the last two words as "...sacrificing sheep".)

Meanwhile: 23,000 words in two weeks (or thereabouts)? A mere 2K or so a day. I don't think I've managed that many words at that pace myself, but I *have* pulled off upwards of 5K in a day on occasion (I think about 9K in one day is my personal record), and I know people on both sides of the pro/fan fence who definitely write that fast.

[jedibuttercup]

LOL, yeah, now I don't think I can unsee that misinterpretation. Poor sheep!

Fun fact: my parents' house is on an acre and a half in the middle of a town of about 15,000 (it was 10,000 when we moved there) and they actually did run sheep on the back third of it for most of my teenage years. Some of them were awesome; almost like pets. Some of them were as featherbrained and aggravating as the turkeys they also tried to raise (twice).

I'm... at about 46,000 now, with a week yet to go? Yeah, I can do it if I keep it up at 2K a day. Inevitably some days are going to be worse, but then there's a weekend in there. I've done in the 5K range on the odd awesome day before, but a typical sustainable pace for me is more in the 1200 word range (goal charts; I've run them before). So this is tiring. But I'll do it!

[graycardinal]

Heh. And I had totally forgotten this, but my own mother reminded me last week that one of our across-the-street neighbors when I was growing up had sheep on the back half of their lot -- probably a bit bigger than yours, but not by too much) -- in our particular slice of the Portlandian outskirts.

Infill being what it is, that former neighbor's parcel is now about half of what will be a dozen or so houses plus cul-de-sac when the current construction is finished. My parents' house, meanwhile, sits on one of the last larger lots on the whole street, wherein she still gets deer in the backyard every once in awhile. (The other large lot is the uphill neighbor's; I've never met the current residents, but one of the prior family's daughters was about my age, and kept a pony in a fenced corral in their back yard. I remember this pony chiefly because it bit me in the chest once -- fortunately, not very hard and with no serious consequences, and I probably was invading its space too closely at the time.)