Year of Words: May — Milkshakes and Mutiny

This month, the pace has been slow and steady. Statistically, things don’t look particularly impressive: May’s total currently stands at only 6670 words, and on two days I wasn’t even able to reach my 100 word quota. I’ve been feeling pretty fatigued — physically from work, mentally from other places — and so I haven’t been able to produce the quantity I would have hoped. However, there have been some small victories.

Firstly, I decided to try writing in public for the first time: facing a personal point of anxiety with the aim of replacing that dread with the promise of progress. On a sweltering Monday afternoon, I went straight from work to a local nerdy café, and fuelled by one of their excellent milkshakes I managed to write 1000 words of Project Pine. Something about being a Writer in a public space motivated me to live up to that title somehow, and without the temptations of home I found myself much more focussed. I can still feel the glow of that achievement, and I hope to try and make a habit of finding new places to write.

Secondly, Part II of Pine is finally finished. While working through it, I had some pretty huge revelations about the setting that I hadn’t considered, and some characters arrived that I didn’t expect. It’s the strangest thing I’ve learned so far this year: the more I write, the more I find the thing writes itself. I am — or was, maybe — an obsessive planner, too afraid to attempt real prose until I knew the exact route I wanted to take. Now that I’m actually working on a large project, I’ve found that the flow of the story finds its course much more organically in the moment, while I’m trying to steer where my characters want to go to align with where they need to end up. I never really believed writers when they described their characters rebelling against their author’s plans, but here I am, watching them dig their heels in the ground as I try to write them making choices they know they wouldn’t really make. It’s very interesting. It’s a bit scary. It’s rather exhilarating.

Other than that, there’s not much to say. The yearly total is at 46,000 words, with Pine itself having just broken 25,000. I’ve just written the opening of Part III, which involves a huge pivot in style and focus. I’m pretty nervous about it, but also really looking forward to seeing how the strangest and heaviest act of the story comes together.

So until next time, fare well, wherever you fare,

— H