bookkeeping

DL(2) Ch. 4: 587 words

Which brings the total for yesterday to: 3204 words

Verdict: Thank god this beastly chapter is moving at last.

Comments:
(1.) I'm feeling ... not guilty exactly, but anxious about posting my word counts when I know that more than one person on my Friends/Friend of list is struggling with writer's block. If my word counts are making it harder for you to write, please let me know (email me if you don't want to say it in a public forum). This is a mildly helpful little mental trick for me, but it's not essential.

(2.) I did overdo it yesterday. Both wrists are stiff. So there won't be much verbiage from me today.

bookkeeping

Thank you very much to everybody who responded to my post this morning. The consensus seems to be that y'all like my word counts, so I'll quit worrying about it.

***
DL(2) Ch. 4: 1550 words

Other work accomplished: Three stories sent out (one surface-mail, two email). About 20 pages of Shakespeare's Ghost Writers read, and Jesus God but I hate Lacan. Not as much as I hate Freud--hateful, nasty, little man that he was--but still pretty well up there. And it baffles me that Marjorie Garber, who also wrote Vested Interests, should be doing such a tremendously STRAIGHT Lacanian reading of Hamlet. I'm hoping she's going to turn everything on its head in the last section, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

Verdict: Good day.

And you're stopping because ... ? Typed in those 1550 words (which I wrote by hand this afternoon), and my wrists need a break.

Comments: I've done something clever, and it's making me happy, so I thought I'd share. WordPerfect has a macros feature, which I've been using for years to make keyboard shortcuts for French accent marks. But just recently I realized I could ALSO use it to make myself a locum tenens, to stick in when I need a name and can't think of one and the story doesn't want to wait. So now, on my keyboard, Alt-B gets me: [blank]. With the "blank" highlighted in fluorescent green, so that I can't miss it the next time I open the file. Now of course, this means eventually I'm going to have to deal with a ghastly backlog of things needing names, but at least now I have a consistent system of noting those things, so I don't have to live with the paranoiac fear that I'll miss one. And the macro makes it easier to do it properly than not.

A small triumph, but mine own.