Sunday Weekly Word Count [1]

I decided that instead of posting my word count daily, I'm just going to do it weekly. And hopefully, someone will join me. Eventually.

4/19
Words: ~ 3129
Pages: ~ 7

4/20
Words: 769
Pages: 2

4/21
Words: 548
Pages: 1.5

4/22 (a sad day in history... Anoop was voted off Idol)
Words: 614
Pages: 2

4/23
Words: 2282
Pages: 5.7

4/24
Words: 2135
Pages: ~ 5

4/25 (tried to write after coming home from the club but the vodka tonics won)
Words: 331
Pages: ~ 1


So that brings my grand weekly total to 9808 words/24.2 pages.

I've reached the 100 page point on my first draft. That makes me feel good. It also makes me feel nervous because I have a lot of things that have yet to happen and they need to happen. Seems like this thing is turning into the Odyssey or something... it's never gonna stop! I think that's why some writers have outlines so they don't get on a tangent. But it's just a first draft so you can go all topsy turvy and reel it in on the second draft. At least that's what they tell me. I don't know. Maybe nobody has ever said that to me.

I usually write sitting cross legged on my couch on this laptop. Sometimes I watch TV but all this weekend I have been enjoying the musical styling of Anoop Desai, Matt Giraud, Adam Lambert, Alexis Grace and Danny Gokey (those are all the American Idol Studio Recordings I have) along with other random artists on my iPod. I have 80 gigs on the iPod but I've only used like 5. I don't know what to do with all that space. When I finally bought an iPod I got a little greedy.

It was such a gorgeous day this weekend I got the opportunity to write outside. I wrote the "My Life as a Rhombus" review outside and some of my story. It was kind of hard only because of the glare. Oh when the sun is shining brightly I hardly know what to do!

My first drafty excerpt from this week:

The city was about 45 minutes away. The bus made its way down Roanoke Drive past all of the subdivisions, through downtown, out to the highway that would take us directly to Detroit. When we first moved to Meadowbrook I thought it was a pretty town, if not boring. There were a lot of brick buildings and flowers everywhere. The sidewalks were smooth and lawns perfectly manicured. Everyone’s house had a second bathroom, if not three. There was a golf course in the middle, nothing world-class, but for the state it was top notch and people traveled a long way just to play on it.

As the bus drove closer to Detroit, the landscape changed. Fences were often broken, the houses were smaller. Inside the city there were empty lots, overgrown with grass and strange weeds, stray dogs wandering the sidewalk a couple of streets away. Former mansions were now crumbling covered in gang sign graffiti, windows broken and stairs fallen in. The bus bumped over some very large potholes that made everything bounce in their seat. I clung onto the edge of my seat and spilled some of my Gatorade on my pants. Kids our age just stood around, on street corners and sometimes in the middle of the street or on the stoop just standing and talking or drinking or staring hard at the big fancy bus rolling though, staring through it as if they could see us but we knew the windows were tinted because the sun shone in our direction like it was trapped under an unspecified haze. Still, I knew they could tell where we came from and that it was nothing like this place.



Look for my review of Dopesick by Walter Dean Myers tomorrow!