July 4th – 540,150

Today has been a much harder day for writing, for a very simple reason. This morning I went to the dentist because I had a filling fall out a couple of days ago. My dentist, is Spanish, and a very gentle woman but she doesn’t like using anaesthetic. Given I have a very low threshold for pain, and a very ingrained phobia about dentists, this makes me very apprehensive about going to see her. When you have a razor sharp edge of tooth enamel in your mouth, and a cavity which is a perfect trap for food particles, what can you do?

The anticipation wrecked my writing concentration before the appointment, and the shakiness from having the filling done without any local anaesthetic has tended to wreck my concentration afterward.

In other words, rather than concentrating on my writing, I’ve been sitting here feeling very, very sorry for myself.

Somehow, despite all that, I’ve managed to get 3,221 words done, taking me past the 540k mark and perhaps more importantly finishing this particular work in progress. As ever though, with my stories, there’s room for a sequel, but in this case, I think I’ll leave that a while before I write it. I have far too many other projects lying around that are demanding, nay, screaming for, my attention at the moment, and it’s that time where I have to pick one. I just looked back at my progress on this one as well – it’s taken me just 15 days to write a 54k novel, the 9^th completed work from this challenge.

Bear in mind I am talking about completed first drafts, not finished polished manuscripts ready for an editor, far from it, but nine books written. Again you have to remember at least three of these were stories I’d already started but not done more than the first few thousand words. I’ve also drafted a start on eight other projects during this last six months, so you could say, my fund of story ideas and starts hasn’t actually diminished, if anything it’s grown, damn it!