Lunch break. Not really that cozy. I’m at Cosí, but it’s cold outside and, on the way over, I realized that I didn’t actually feel that well. Tired, head sorta heavy, basically blah-ish. Probably just tired. It had better not be another Major U-provided case of The Icks, right before a holiday weekend. A holiday weekend that is rumored to be quite nicely weathered, for a change.

Good thing I have to work late tonight, amiright?

An update on my book progress:

66,118 words. 12 days until my deadline.

Oops.

It’s very likely that the answer to this dilemma is to move my deadline. It was rather arbitrarily set, to begin with. One of those 12 days is today—the working late day I already mentioned—and two of those days at the end are going to be spent getting to, being in, and coming back from Indiana for my nieces’ third birthday party.

(THREE! I can’t believe it. They are so AWESOME, these girls. Had a full conversation with them the other day on the phone, asking questions, getting answers, providing follow-up information. What do they want for their birthday? Sprinkles. On their cake, they mean. But they also liked the sound of getting presents, too.)

So technically, that’s probably only more like…9 days. If I assume that the first draft is going to run me somewhere in the hood of 100K words, then my writer math for the next 9 days (not going to show my work on this one): 3,764 words a day.

If you don’t write, you may not know how ridiculous that is. It’s severely ridiculous, especially for someone who works full-time somewhere. I can probably kick up production over what I’ve been doing, but 3,764 words a day would only be in the realm of reality if I were going on vacation.

Which I might be. But not in the next 9 days.

So. Fail? I’m not going to look at it that way. I’m still closer to the end of my novel than I was when I set the goal. I’ve done a lot of note-taking and idea-generation, too, so that I know fairly well at this point what the rest of the book will hold. I just need to knock each scene out, one at a time, until I get to the end.

One thing to consider: the end might not take until 100K words. Maybe if I could churn out 2K a day for nine days…

But for now, I don’t think I want to play the writer math game. I just want to make time to get the pages done. The writer math I need to be doing: counting minutes I can spare. Whittling time that is spent elsewhere into the shape of writing time.

Lucky for me, most of the TV shows I like just went into hiatus. Excellent timing, TV. Well done.

But TV? Do NOT kill off Beckett, OK? I’ll never speak to you again.