Panic Time!

About this time every WriMo, I reach a point where I look at the date on the calendar, then look at my shockingly low word count, and panic. "Gasp! The deadline's only two weeks away!" This is when I stop procrastinating and start writing. In fact, it's usually in the last two weeks that I do most of my writing, period.

A good example is last month. The end of Script Frenzy was only two weeks away, and I had written only 40 pages. As almost always happens, I got off my duff and started writing. My final page count was 171, and I'd finished a amazingly good first draft compared to the absolute messes I usually create during a novel-writing month.

Now consider this: there's two weeks left in MayNoWriMo. The word count for Black Science currently stands at 5,790. Clearly I've been procrastinating. Part of the reason is that I spent too much time working on Bad Company instead: the character dynamics of that novel fascinated me much more than the less complicated stuff in Black Science. I guess there's simply more emotional kick-in-the-gut in Bad Company,. Another reason is that I simply took a week off. I didn't even touch the computer for a week. There's weird reasons for that, which I won't get into. The result is that I'm way behind in writing Black Science.

I know what comes next. I start writing. I write up a storm so that I surpass the margin of victory. I write my butt off at times. Then, after 50,000 words, I put the novel aside and turn to the next project. What do I have scheduled for June? I plan to complete the second draft of Bad Company, and the easier job of writing the second (and probably final) draft of Spanner. But first, I have about 45,000 words of Black Science to write. Here goes...