Hope you all had a good turkey day yesterday. I got no writing done, but we had a good Thanksgiving. We made corn chowder to bring over to Martha's and the chowder was a hit. I didn't stuff myself, but I had plenty of dessert. There was some talk about writing. We played consequences and the dictionary definition game.

There was a holiday milonga in the evening, so X and I went to tango for about an hour. Eugene is unique for its writing community and its tango community, for which we belong to each one. How appropriate that Thanksgiving should include both of them.


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Here's a quote by Stephen King from his new foreword for The Gunslinger: Dark Tower I. Here he's talking about revising a novel while writing the first draft:

"I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist's most insidious enemy, which is doubt."

I like that. Even when I write short fiction, all sorts of questions come up in the back of my mind. Is this plausible? Am I boring the reader? Am I going in the right direction? How's my grammar in that last sentence?

Doubt is insidious, indeed. Inertia from writing magnifies the doubt, for me.

I'm by no means a fast writer, but the more I write the more I'm convinced that just throwing words down on paper while in a narrative is much more productive AND fulfilling than the angst-ridden days I used to have (and sometimes still have) where I just sit at the desk and produce nothing between meandering thought and doubt.

This a good thing to remember as I'm starting my second novel. Although it's only my second novel, I already know that writing a novel builds its own momentum, like a snowball rolling down down a steep hillside, collecting more snow thus building more mass and speed. It creates discipline. There's a reason to go the keyboard everyday and continue building, creating, and discovering.

At least I hope I have the same experience with the second novel as I did with the first.

Today I wrote 864 words. I'm still discovering the beginning of the novel, but not to worry. I am inside this novel. More words will come.