I’ve been on vacation for a week (didja miss me?) but I wasn’t sitting idly on the beach twiddling my thumbs and altering my DNA.
Okay, so I did a little of that. It was my tenth wedding anniversary, so my wife and I decided to get away from it all. It’s off season, but unseasonably warm, so we rented a beach house on the Texas gulf coast, down south of Galveston. Right on the beach, with the constant sound of the Gulf of Mexico surf, looking east over the water so the sunrises were spectacular. It was in the 80s in the daytime and I don’t think it dropped below the low 70s at night. The community, which consists mostly of rental houses, was almost abandoned, so it was like we had a three-mile stretch of beach all to ourselves.
We read, cooked, hung out, tanned, slept, stared at the waves, went for walks and bicycle rides on the beach, vegetated, etc., but we stayed completely off the internet, the telephone and 95% away from the television. We also found time to work each day. I doubt that I’ve ever had such a prolific stretch of days in my life. I left home with something like 15,000 words completed on my NaNoWriMo novel and returned yesterday with over 43,000 words. About 28,000 words in five days. Who knows if any of it is any good, but it feels good. My goal is to get the plot down and then go back and flesh out some things that I’m aware of skimping on at present. I need to make a quick trip out to West Texas to get some local color, but I see the whole story and it feels like someone is telling it to me and I’m writing it down. An amazing sensation. I hope it keeps up to the end of the novel, which I estimate will be about 65-75,000 in first draft.
One thing for sure—completing this NaNoWriMo 50,000 target is a shoe-in unless I drop dead tonight. I have fewer than 5000 words to go. I’m back to my usual 2000 words per day since the vacation is over, but still.
My geeky moment for the day. I jokingly suggested a name for Caitlin R. Kiernan’s monthly erotic vignette subscription service, and it stuck! See Item 2 in the MErViSS faq.
Signed the contract today for a new short story publication in an upcoming anthology that hasn’t been officially announced yet, so I’ll bide my time until the publisher spills the beans first.
