Yesterday I wrote roughly 5,000 words while working at Starbucks all afternoon. I also got, essentially, a free latte on top of my purchased latte. That was lovely. Bryan said that for the price of a latte he’d love to see me write 5,000 words a day. I laughed and said, Yeah, me too. When I got home, I wrote more, giving me a daily total of 6,792. That was higher than any single day’s total I’d written during NaNoWriMo in November.

The key: No internet.

(Yeah, I feel a bit guilty for posting this instead of working on today’s word count.)

2009 resolution: Keep track of daily word counts and other accomplishments made on a daily basis to give me a graphical/journalistic sense of my actual, concrete progress… check. How gratifying it is to see the Excel spreadsheet I’ve made (with formulae and graphs) being used. It’s colorful and it’s already started showing me my demonstrable progress for the year so far.

To explain why today’s word count is going sluggishly… Today I took a trip upstate to try on my wedding dress. Miraculously, being 5’8.5″ tall (YES that half inch is important to me) plus 2.5″ heels is apparently the precise height you need to be to not need the hem of these David’s Bridal gowns from dragging. It was the perfect length in the heels. When I take them off and switch to flats I’m going to really have to work on not falling flat on my face, but really, it’s worth it to not have the cost of the hemming alteration. (The dress actually needs no alterations, just a bustle added. Woo for apparently being the correct mathematical proportions for my dress size!)

It was weird. I wasn’t really excited about the whole thing. I love the gown, don’t get me wrong, but I think the perfectionist in me is really starting to wonder about how Murphy’s Law will effect the wedding. Remember, everything that can go wrong… can… or will… or hopefully won’t. Oh, stress.

Speaking about the draft, I am writing [a new project] in first person for the first time since my short stories in college, where it was usually my favorite point of view. I realized, a few thousand words in, that without first person, this character would be a fraction as interesting, both to read and write. As every single one of my characters is a facet of my personality as I like to think of them, it’s weird writing her, because I’m realizing her shortcomings and faults and seeing the ones she reflects in me sharply. (All of my characters, after being created, hop out of my head, become more fully formed and realized people than I’d originally anticipated, and walk around. I don’t know where they go before I get their stories written…) This protagonist thinks about a lot of stuff she is too self-conscious to actually say aloud, which happens to me a lot. And she’s not very witty when she speaks. She’s rather awkward in a sweet, naive way. But it keeps happening to her detriment — well, this is the beginning, after all, in her arc — and I’m realizing that I don’t usually speak up a lot of the time when I’m with strangers. With friends I’ll willingly be loud and obnoxious, but in one English class in college, I did not speak at all for all but two of the classes across the entire semester. I was terrified of judgment. It’s something I constantly work on. Seeing that flaw of mine as I’m writing this aspect of the protagonist’s personality, it’s strangely gripping. Maybe that’s why I can’t ignore this draft right now. I really want to see where her plot goes. I know vaguely where it goes, as I always do, but I have a feeling the little things will really matter for her… and for me.