Quarantine Project Day 20
This is the half-way bell. 20 days into the Quarantine Project and the overall wordcount takes me exactly where I would want to be.
Though the half-way point for me usually ushers in a multitude of demons because you are equidistant from the start and the finish and land is nowhere in sight. The book is not making sense. It has no shape. You've lost any talent you had. You picked the wrong project in the first place. Quit now and don't expend any more time on it because you are throwing good wordcounts after bad. You're an idiot and who said you were a writer anyway? Etcetera.
The only thing that - or the important thing - that gets me out of a becalmed or demon-crusted middle is the fact that I have been here quite a few times before. There is no option but to make movement, make splashes, avoid drowning.
In this case, though I'm not stuck.
This indicates either a) things are running better than usual and presages fair weather ahead or b) I'm fooling myself, and the fact that things are going well suggests only that another demon is hiding behind that tree or c) I haven't really reached the half-way point at all.
I don't know because I don't fully know what's coming. The novel is taking shape, but I still don't know what it will look like at the end. To switch from the nautical metaphor, it's like looking at a parachute coming closer as it descends. You're not sure what load it carries.
But today's word-count was 2158, offering a half-way tally of 37,338, and if you'd asked me at the start I would have gladly taken that.
(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")
