Last night at midnight I passed page 50 in my manuscript.
Today is my third straight day sequestered in my house, cellphone shut off, doing absolutely nothing except type, eat, piss and sleep. I feel like a soldier. My beard is exploring the lower reaches of my neck. It is like a marathon — a crazy idea, but one that you just have to do to prove yourself.
And I have learned a lot. I’ve learned to just keep typing, even when forget what I’m doing. To stop could mean the loss of hours of work. I’ve learned to let go of my devotion to the clock and the arbitrary schedules I’ve set for myself, to stop beating myself up if I start something ten minutes later than I thought I would. And I’ve learned that no matter how much research and preparation I do beforehand, always something unexpected will come up that I never could have foreseen.
Example, last night I reached a pivotal point in the plot much sooner than anticipated, and took a five minute break from typing to find my place in my outline and sketch out some next steps. All out of nowhere I get this idea for my protag to see a Spanish painting in a hotel restaurant. I don’t know why; I don’t have any memory of a Spanish painting in a hotel restaurant myself. It just bubbled up from the depths, I guess. Anyway, fool that I am, I then stopped typing and started googling Spanish paintings, wasting hours staring at Goya’s Black Paintings (which unfortunately, no one has done a very good job of collecting online — note to self). And none of which even remotely connect to the themes of my story. Good education on Goya — bad waste of time.
And that is what I learned over my summer vacation.
The aces aligned for this weekend. All but one of my housemates are out of town for the holiday, leaving me a deserted house all to my self. I’ve eaten well without running out of food. The weather has behaved. The distractions are non-existent.
Every weekend should be like this.
But every weekend won’t be like this one, this has been extraordinary, a one-off. There will parties and chores and errands and social outings and friends wanting me to listen to them talk about other friends. I know this. I’m fine with it. I’ll make another weekend like this — promise. For now I just need to get this weekend complete TODAY before I go see El Caudillo at 7:00pm and start on my homework. I need to congratulate myself for what I have accomplished, even if it is not the full 90-page perfect manuscript I had imagined.
And I need to set myself up for Act II, the middle section, the next 200 pages. I can’t even remember what I sketched in my outline for that. All I know is that I will have to get myself excited about writing that long stretch, as excited as I am to finish this glorious first act.
