Laying the Groundwork

This morning as I got up, I felt wretched. I have a full day of journalism work ahead of me, which means I won't be at home until later tonight, and I know I'm going to be completely knackered, so I won't write. 

That only leaves me with one option-- write my 800 words before I leave for work. 

And this is exactly why I didn't want to get out of bed this morning.

But I'm an adult. For the most part. So I did. And because I would rather do anything than write the darn thing, I read my e-mail, I washed the dishes, I cooked some eggs, and I jumped in the shower. And then it came to me. The next scene. 

All I had to do, I realized, was to know the next scene I was going to write, visualize it in my head, and put that into 800 words somehow. Or maybe I could do two scenes. Or whatever. But all I really needed to know was what happened next, not the whole bloody book. 

So I thought of the two things that I needed to happen next in my story, and I came out of the shower knowing exactly what I was going to write. And I did. 870 straight words. 

Damn, I feel great. 

One of the things I'm noticing is that I'm a little conflicted about my voice. Ideally, I'd like to be funny. But I'm also writing what will be deemed a somewhat serious subject. I don't know how to be funny without making a joke of the entire thing. My protagonist will have to be funny, I think, but how I'm going to keep that tone in the book is something I haven't figured out yet. 

But I've got rewrites and edits for that. Right now, the way I see it, my job is to get 80,000 words of crap on to the page. We can pretty it up later, we can spice it up, funny it up, whatever. I can think about all the plot holes and the message and all of it at some other point. But right now, my job is to get it all out. Whatever the "it" is. I'm sure somewhere along the way, say at 40,000 words, I'll find the answers to my questions. 

But for now, I'm plugging away.