almost 49,000 words and ⌘ + Shift + 4

Every weekday during the kids' naptimes I work on my book. For almost all of last month I hated it. I had terrible writers block. I knew where I was going, but I was slogging through the pages so slowly. Sometimes I was lucky to get a couple hundred words down. The places I was going had fun, exciting scenes to write, but the pages I had to fill to get there were grueling to write, because they were the every day things that lead to the interesting things.

But you can't have a meaningful first kiss if there's no reason for you to love the boy, right?

So I had to write them. But man, I hated it.

This month has been more fun. I'm averaging about 1,000 words a day, give or take about a hundred. I think about my characters during the day, zone out driving thinking about how to get something to happen, and have to tune back in to my girlie asking questions about lizards or what have you from the back seat. It's been exciting. As you see above, I'm almost up to 49,000 words. Check it out:

Are you trying to read it? Don't. I'm pretty sure the gaussian blur will attack your retinas.

48,862! 60,000 is a full-fledged novel length (but my story has far longer to go before it's finished, I think). Still. Thats a ton of writing. A ton of naptimes. I don't think I've ever gotten this far, at least not since I wrote a slightly embarrassing "novel" start to finish at age 14. You can imagine the kind of things a 14 year old would write in a novel, I'm sure.

No, you can't read it! How terrible! There is enough bad writing out there without you reading something I wrote when I was 14. (Which is also what I tell myself on the days that I think I am a terrible, terrible writer. I just figure, I've seen some pretty terrible things in print, so even if I have no talent, that doesn't mean I shouldn't eventually get published. Persevere!)

About twice a month I want to screen capture something on my Mac, but I always forget how and have to google it. If you're wondering, it's ⌘ + Shift + 4.