20 Thousand Words Under the Sea

In other news, I hit the 20,000 word mark on the novel I am working on. I'm not too happy with my writing progress on many fronts, but the rock bottom, bare minimum I demand of myself, is that I write 5000 words a week on it, so that I will have a a genuine bad first draft by the end of summer. Sometimes I scribble in my notebook on the bus in the morning, then type it up on my lunch hour at work-that usually gets me the first two or three hundred, and I have to do the remaining six or seven hundred in the evening. What doesn't happen during the week has to happen on the weekend.

I'm not sure the novel is really the kind of thing can ever go anywhere at all, so it is very scary to work on it instead of a screenplay. but then I think--well I've spent that long on lots of screenplays that are also languishing in virtual desk drawers on my hard drive--so what am I so scared of?

Coming back to one specific screenplay (Children of Others--still kicking, and still kicking me in the ass) that I need to revise is so difficult and depressing that I made today's goal (in addition to the 5000 words) be to simply find and open the two most recent versions. I didn't have to write, or even look, tonight. I just had to open them. Mission accomplished.