Anyway, today I made myself leave work promptly after I'd finished the morning class, just waiting long enough to catch up on LiveJournal reading while I ate a sandwich (it's a long drive home on an empty stomach). I really should be leaving at lunchtime on Fridays to make up for the time I spend doing evening classes, but it's easy to think, "Oh, I just need to do... And then I need to mark... And... And..." And before I know it it's 5 pm and I get home too late and too tired to write. But, as I said, today I put myself first for once and so after pear and couple of nuts for sustenance and a cup of Darjeeling tea to sip as I typed, I settled down and wrote 708 brand new words. It's still definitely a "shitty first draft". Some of it is little more than talking heads and then there are sections like this:
Patticlus was silent for a moment, his brow furrowed thoughtfully. "Well, that's a nice idea, but firstly, we couldn't afford it. There are two and a half thousand people in Longleton. Even if everyone wanted to contribute, Cleaver wants four million [[things]] for Holly Pike. That would mean every person giving --" he paused, his eyes taking on a slightly glazed look as he did the mental arithmetic "-- something under two thousand [[things]] each."
"One thousand six hundred [[things]] to be exact," Wil said promptly.
Patticlus raised his eyebrows.
"I'd already worked it out," Wil admitted.
"And bear in mind, some of those two and half thousand people are babies and children, or old people living on limited means. In practice, the number able to contribute anything more than a few [[lesser things]] would be a lot less."
"About a thousand, I reckoned."
On my writing To Do list is "invent currency".
Novel statistics are as follows:
Currently working on Chapter 7 (2266 words so far)
Total MS stands at: 32,250
I stopped because the CD came to an end, which meant I'd done about 40 minutes and it was time to sort out the spare room for our daughter and husband who are paying a flying visit tomorrow. (Sans Rottweiler, thankfully. He's very sweet, but very large and heavy and bouncy and I do find him rather overwhelming.)