Tonight I caught up with the word count required for day 13 of the novel-in-a-month project. I basically sacrificed most of Saturday and the entire Sunday–except for walking my dog, Star–to get caught up. I blew off a bunch of errands. After that, I pressed on and wrote tomorrow’s word count as well. So now I’m ahead, finally. (Last year, I shot out ahead early and stayed way ahead of the count.)

One of the things I’ve learned is this: Writing the required word count (1,665 per day for 30 days) is not the hard part. Scene planning is the thing that makes this difficult. Once I actually have a plan for the scene I’m about to write, and I’m excited about that scene, it all goes very quickly. (Sometimes, all that’s required is a rough direction, like, “Goes to meet his brother in a parking lot.”) If I don’t have a plan for the scene I want to write, I am essentially dead in the water.

Now, tomorrow I have to go back to work, and I have a bunch of visitors in town from Chicago. Bah…I need another weekend.