These past three days I’ve been on a whirlwind writing tour. If you follow me on Twitter, you will see that I have written 9935 words in three days and I’m not even done for the night. I have about another 4K to go before I call it quits. That will be almost a 5K average a day. What’s interesting about this number is that on most days, I’ve started late in the day.
The house gets quiet and suddenly, my mind is alight with ideas and words and they all want to come out at once. I can’t type enough to keep them flowing. And I’m a slow typist...LOL...as I only do about 35 words a minute. But when the creative juices flow and I am dead on with a story, I go fast.
If I were having a race, I would say that the best I’ve ever done in an hour was about a thousand words. Yeah, you read the number correctly. While that may seem like a huge number, all it means to me is that I was in the groove and my mind was flowing exactly with the story. It doesn’t happen very often but when it does, I go with the flow until I drop.
You never know when you’ll get on another writing streak and you have to take them as they come. Creative creatures are fickle and I’ll be the first to admit it. When I saw this quote, I knew I had found something worth repeating.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow
When I get on a writing jag my family and many of my friends tell me I act as if I have schizophrenia. I frequently have insomnia. I hear the voices of my characters and they won’t shut up until I’ve written at least one chapter a day. Then there’s the fact I will get forgetful due to the lack of sleep and even talk funny as part of the whole system. Probably the worst part is that it all seems normal to me.
Part of my problem is the middle of the night is the only time where the house is one-hundred percent quite. In most rooms I can hear a pin drop. There’s no sound of the DH and the teenager having an argument or a discussion. They like to call them negotiations which, drive me nuts. LOL! The animals are asleep and all TVs are either off or at a bare minimum as far as sound goes. The only part I don’t like is that my office shade becomes translucent at night and I appear as a floating head to those outside.
Yup, it’s fun to see people stop and stare because all they can see is the light from the monitor reflecting off my face. I explain my concern to the DH and didn’t believe him when he told me that at all. He had to take a picture to show me and I must admit it is weird. Probably weirder for those who shouldn’t be out wandering late at night. LOL!
As much as I love chatting with you all, I really must get back to those pesky characters. They screamed at me all through dinner and are doing it again because I’m putting together this blog. They’re probably up to something I don’t want them to do...hey, wait...I tell them what to do.
See you all tomorrow! Have a great day!
Lynn
