look! In the last two weeks, I’ve gone from 361 pages, to . . . 361 pages! And it only took me 5,000 words to do it, too!

There’s a certain kind of unholy glee that arises as the pages pile on, and the number of words gets larger and larger. It makes you feel like you’re progressing, even as your scenes slip into haphazard gobbledygook. Bigger numbers are better, right? Wrong. There’s something about highlighting 20 pages and pressing the delete key that’s just awful. Nobody likes having a negative word writing day. But even the common maxim, “save them in some other file–maybe you’ll use them!” didn’t help. They were bad. They were not good. They were very not good. Those three sentences will give you a decent idea of how very not good those pages were.

But I fixed it–and now I’ve nailed down the two hardest parts of the book: the black moment, and the necessary set up for it in a few key chapters before hand. There are still two major external threads I need to deal with. But I now know what the underlying emotion is for much of it, and I feel like I can go on. It’s liberating–even though today’s word count is officially negative four thousand.
What about you? What have been the hardest negative words you’ve ever written?

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