Amidst all my musings on gouda last time, I forgot to mention the project.  It’s happily chugging along; a thousand-ish words yesterday, thirteen hundred-ish the day before, a solid fifteen hundred and change today.  The momentum is still boiling and I’m thanking goodness for that.  Strangely, it’s been a little bit tougher to get the writing done this week.  Not nearly so many demands on my time, but I seem to be hitting more roadblocks with the story.  But as I’ve detailed before, I’m getting better at throat-punching my roadblocks, which is exactly what I’ve done, which all contributes to the rather monumental discovery that I made today.  Having typed that, let me clarify that the discovery is only monumental on a personal sliding scale.  I’m not curing cancer over here or anything.  That said, hyperbole is exciting!  Fireworks!  Streamers!  Puppies!  Accomplishment!

So anyway, I was happily squeezing out my daily word count over a sandwich at lunch today when I saw my page numbers have rolled over into the thirties.  I use a nice small font and don’t waste a lot of space on the page, so it takes me a good chunk of words to fill a page, though I’ve not yet counted how many words I get on a page on average.  Actually, I guess I have, but I haven’t done the math yet, because fargo math.  I didn’t take creative writing in college because I’m the kind of person who does math for fun, DonDraper it.

That’s a lie.  Numbers are fascinating and complex and, if you think about them long enough, the sheer overwhelming enormity of their significance, could, I’ve heard, devour your soul without a whit of conscience.  (I checked my comma usage in the previous sentence and, rest easy, it is correct.)  (Also, I fully realize that my comma [ab]use is probably the least of your concerns.)  However, being one of those creative types, I prefer to admire their poetry quietly from afar, musing on their possibilities in the way that I imagine an ant knows and appreciates the sun is there without having the slightest understanding that its (the ant’s) entire existence is fueled, nay, POSSIBLE because of it (the sun); in other words, don’t bother me with the goldfinger details.  I will leave it to others to dive screaming into the swirling throbbing depths of the infinitude of numbers, armed with their brains of +4 maths.  People like my brother-in-law, who builds missiles.  That’s right, mother truckers, a real-life honest-to-god ROCKET SCIENTIST reads my drivel and gets his jollies (not all, but at least one or two) from my little pile of content.

Sidenote: rather than a table of contents, I want to write a book that has a “pile of contents”.  Then again, when you think about it, that’s all a book is, innit?

Er, that was a sidenote to a sidenote.  The point is, numbers.

Glorious numbers!  Fantastical numbers!  So-big-you’ll-slap-your-mama numbers!  The overall goal for August is ninety thousand words.  That’s a whole lot of words.  A dauntingly huge amount.  So huge, it’s best not thought of.  So I haven’t thought of it.  But here, at the end of two weeks’ work on the project, thirty pages (and change) deep, I thought that the time for thinking about it might be this time, so I thought about it.  I ran a word count on the entirety of my draft as it stands thus far, just to see where I stood.  The grand total as it stands right now is almost seventeen thousand.

Seventeen thousand words is a haberdashery of a lot of words.  Now, it’s a far, far cry short of the ninety thousand I need to have this thing taken seriously.  But it’s also a far cry from where I started.  It’s tangible, significant progress; progress that is heartening and a little overwhelming; progress that is chest-thumpingly awesome.

There is not only quantitative progress but creative progress as well; the story is organically sprouting tentacles that I don’t even remember coding into its DNA, and it’s now attracting lightning strikes and spawning new lifeforms.  New characters, new plots, new subplots, new complications, are occurring to me all the time, faster than I can write them into this thing.  This is the heady thrill of creative adrenaline, and it is surging.

So this is me, thumping my chest a little bit.  I have almost seventeen thousand words in the bag and a rocket scientist reading my blog.  Sharknado yeah.

Chuck’s writing challenge for the week is a 10-chapter story in just 1000 words.  I’m going to try for it this weekend as I take a break from the Project, but it feels tailor-made to hurt me.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, BUT I TEND TO RAMBLE.  Short choppy chapters are not my bag.  BUT I WILL TRY.