Procrastinating

We're having a peaceful afternoon. It's Wednesday, so the kids get out of school at 1:30 (why? I don't know. One of those Davis school things designed mostly to inconvenience parents, from what I can tell). I signed Will up for a class on Wednesday afternoons to fill the time so he doesn't drive Rachel and me crazy. So we took him over there, and then drove around Davis delivering birthday party invitations. Since the party is a week from tomorrow, I decided I'd put off sending them to long to use the mail and we just hand-delivered them. We saw an interesting cross-section of Davis that way. One of Rachel's classmates evidently lives in a trailer park that I wasn't even aware existed even though it's only about a mile from our house. We also delivered invitations to people in neighborhoods with enormous houses too. So it's not like I was just looking down my nose going "ew" or anything.

Normally we'd come home and do homework, but the kids are off tomorrow and the next day. Okay, I'll admit I'm looking forward to getting to sleep in, but otherwise -- aaaah! What am I going to do with them? They already saw "The Incredibles" last weekend, and if we're home and I'm not letting them watch TV all day, they start to fight and climb the walls. Maybe I'll make some playdough or something. Anyway, it's quiet here now -- Rachel happily entertains herself, and this would be the perfect time to work on my novel. Am I doing that? No, of course not.

Yesterday I screwed around almost all day and didn't start writing till the kids were in bed. I totally didn't feel like it but I was intent on getting in my 1700 words before I went to bed so I pushed through my resistance and just did it. For a while I was checking the word count every few sentences, but then I kind of got into it and just wrote. When I got to the end of the scene, I checked my word count again. I'd only been trying to make it to 16,800 and I found myself at 17,300. Woo hoo!

Not bad considering what happened this weekend. I'm still not sure what I did exactly, but the end result is that the 6,100 words I'd written up to that point vanished. I mean, they were gone. And so I had to start over! I was at a mountain cabin with girlfriends and we were there to write and eat and drink and have fun, and there was no way in hell I was going to let a little thing like losing my whole novel so far ruin my weekend, so I just opened a new document and started typing. And by the end of Sunday night, I had 15,000 words. So there :-)