Today was another good day, but much more spread out than the three previous days. By that I mean that I started writing this morning, and didn’t finish until just now, but I wasn’t really writing continuously for the last 5 hours or so. I did it in small chunks. This was in part because of some research that I needed to do along the way. It was also due in part to my first major deviation from my outline. I’m not worried about that deviation. It turns out that it makes for a much better story. But it mean that I ended up writing several smaller scenes today, instead of what I had originally planned. Now that I have an idea of the new directions things are going, I’ll be updating my plan accordingly. (That’s another reason things were more spread out: I was jotting down a lot of notes on scenes that I’d already written.)

I finished the with 2,114 words on the day, less than half of what I wrote yesterday, but still well above par. I also passed the 10,000 word-mark, so that my 4-day total now stands at 10,516 words. Here are my official Day 4 stats:

I had some insight today on how my writer’s brain works. There was a scene in which my narrator was discussing how certain information could be lost. He was talking with another character, and for verisimilitude, I had him working on a small garden as he talked. What was in the garden? I wasn’t sure. So I went with peas–and realized at once that choice was no accident. I then conveyed the story of Gregor Mendel, who used peas to tease out the laws of inheritance, only for those laws to be lost for a generation before they were rediscovered. So what started out as verisimilitude worked into substance and made for a good scene. I need to learn to trust my instincts more, like I did here.

Here I am after I finished up my writing for the day today:

I’m going to treat myself to a Robert Reed novella.

How’s everyone else doing? Y’all had an extra hour,what with Daylight Saving Time coming to an end early this morning.