finish my first novel

Somehow my source of writing has scabbed over and it hurt to reopen it.

Yes, I’ve been procrastinating and if my husband hadn’t gone out tonight, I would have procrastinated through yet another evening.

I was really pleased last Monday, because I had finished chapter four. On the other hand, it’s much harder to start a new chapter than to pick up from where you left off last time.

Wow, that went much better than I expected. Connecting up the first part of chapter four to the end of it, the sex scene that I wrote months ago, was almost completely seamless.

I’ve had insomnia for over a week now and haven’t had the strength to write anything, but I got a decent sleep last night, so I thought I’d better get back to it.

It’s amazing how you can only write so far and then you have to make some decisions and the longer you put them off, the harder it is to go on writing.

That was very hard to get into, although, to be fair, it may have something to do with having to clean up an overturned catbox just before sitting down to write.

I was only going to do 500 words, but by the end of those 500 words, chapter 3 was only 170 words from being done, so I finished chapter three, and then I was only 100 words from having written 1,000, so now I’ve written 1,000 words and I feel good.

The first four chapters are almost done.

Holly Lisle suggests using the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html)’s list of “Basic Plots in Literature” as a tool, not for your whole plot, but as the building blocks of it. Works pretty well. I’ve been rolling dice to to pick plot points at random.