I'm grinding wordcount

The weather forecast for today was apocalyptic. Whiteout conditions, heavy snow, windchills well below zero. When we went to bed last night they were already reading a list of school closings. I worked ahead yesterday, did all my work for today as well as most of the work for my co-employee, just so I'd be able to call in Snow Day if it was too bad. Hell, I was counting on sleeping in. So yeah, we got snow, but certainly not the dire conditions that were called for. Certainly nothing that justified showing up late, much less not showing up at all.

So here I am at work. There's nothing to do. I'm on tomorrow's work (just got a rush that's due by noon!) and tomorrow was looking like a light day anyway. I hope it picks up.

I've done two things to address my writing productivity. First, I've changed my daily quota from one thousand words down to eight hundred words. Write eight hundred words every day, and you'll get a novel in one hundred days. Well, longer, since HoV was around 92k words, but you get the idea. Secondly, I've been stopping each night's work pretty much mid-sentence. Used to be I'd work to a section break, or at least a scene break, and each night I'd spend some amount of time kickstarting the writing process, trying to decide how I wanted to approach and shape the next section. Now I just sit down and write the next word. By the time I get to the section break I'm already on a roll and it's just a matter of keeping at it.

This is working. Each night's writing hasn't taken more than twenty minutes so far. I was a little intimidated at first by the prospect of starting a whole new book from scratch, but I've remembered that I know these characters, I know these places, and I know how to make them do interesting things. So it's settling down.

Some thoughts on World of Warcraft. I'm enjoying it, sure, and I understand how it could be all consuming. I don't think that's going to be a problem for me. There's no narrative context. I mean, there's some, but not in the same way as a game like Final Fantasy. I don't get quite the same thrill out of finding new places or meeting new people. Mission accomplishment isn't as fulfilling as working through the storyline in something like FFVII. I don't have the same sense of connection with my character, or the characters I'm playing with. Which is ironic, since the characters you play with in FF aren't real people. They're too interesting to be real people, let's be honest.

Anyway. I do like leveling. And I have a pet!