That majesty, to keep decorum.
I didn’t write a word yesterday. Thursday. —Actually, I wrote two words: “The hill—”
I just deleted them.
We’re off to a good start?
I finished the (first) draft of No. 21, “Gallowglas,” on Wednesday night, which mostly consisted of writing out what I’d spent Monday and Tuesday not writing out, and then sitting back,
and then sitting up again to close the file (and thinking, as any writer can’t help but do at moments like this, of the horribly ambiguous gesture Richard Dreyfuss makes at the end of Stand By Me—were we supposed to understand he was supposed to be shutting down the computer itself, when he merely shut off the monitor? Were we supposed to understand he hadn’t saved his file, that his gesture was destructive, purgative, restorative? Or had he just, y’know, shut off his damn monitor?)—and I let out a breath it felt like I’d been holding for, well, far too damn long.
Now it’s time to write out the—is it a spoiler to say it’s an epilogue? This is, after all, first and foremost a television show, and I was reading somewhere about how ever since the Sopranos everybody’s been tying up their seasonal arcs in a blow-out in the penultimate episode, and using the last one before the break not as a cliff-hanger,
but as a breath-catch after the plunge averted, the stock-taking after a loss sustained. But I got my initial splash of it from the fourth season of Buffy, which is anyway where I first started thinking about the structures of long-form episodic storytelling, and anyway had it reinforced by the Wire, which played that card with a flourish every time, and it has nothing to do with whether these folks stole it from those folks or who had the idea first, it has to do with the fact that there’s love yet for the epilogue, and not enough of them in the world.
That hill, then. —Oh, there’s a hill, and a flickering, winding line, but not of candles, and anyway that’s not where it’ll start. I just figured out this morning where it’ll start, is the thing. I’ve still got a list of all the things it’ll be impossible to fit, but that’s the sort of problem I can deal with. Knowing where to start, which word to put down, and which word comes after that—that was the problem. For about 24 hours or so, there.
If you’re following along at home, then: I’ve written 32,064 words of what was only thus far supposed to’ve been about 30,000; there’s still 15,000 to write, and only a day over two weeks left to write them in; a thousand words a day, here on out, if it’s to be done by then.
It’ll be close, I guess? —So far, over the course of the Write-a-Thon, I’ve written 16,345 words: an average of 630 words a day, for more than three weeks running, now. 32,066 words since March 31. (I’m counting “That hill” in the total since it was there, yesterday, even if it’s gone today.) That’s the longest sustained blast of—productivity? creativity? —The longest string of one word after another, anyway, that I can recall maintaining since this thing began.
So there’s that, then, for endings. They have a momentum. —Even if it’s hard, sometimes, catching your breath again, after you finally let that big one out.
—posted 4136 days ago
