Tonight was just terrifying. After 30 minutes of intense typing, I had written 1,340 words. I probably could have done more if I had not allowed myself to get hung up so many times. I want to write more in a 30-minute session. It will just take practice.
None of that is the scary part. Writing 1,340 words (essentially the same number of words that I wrote last night) is worthy of some self-praise. That added to the fact that I managed to do it two nights in a row despite lacking a little willpower after setting up this site and signing up for the Critters Workshop makes tonight a screaming success.
That is excepting one small fact: I almost erased all my work. When I highlighted everything I had just written to get an accurate word count (for posting here and personal goals), instead of clicking on the Word Count button, I clicked on Thesaurus. I immediately clicked on Word Count and got what I needed, but when MS Word tried to resolve over 1,300 words into the Thesaurus, it blew up and shut Word down completely. I was terrified that I had lost everything and prayed for an Autorecovered copy of the chapter. Thankfully, just that happened. In the moments between stopping typing and Word shutting down, an Autorecovered copy was saved. When I booted Word back up, there it was in all its glory. I am so relieved.
So, the lesson for tonight is that you should always save your work before you start clicking buttons. I know I will take that to heart in the days to come.
BONUS: Chapter Four will be finished tonight. I only have a few short paragraphs to write to finish out my thoughts and I am on to Chapter Five. Now, as to Chapter Five: this is a chapter that I wrote over a year ago. Even then, I was a little iffy as to whether or not it was even worth allowing it to exist in its current form. I do not foresee having my 30 minutes tomorrow dedicated solely to writing. I intend (at some point) to read what I have written and make a plan for my writing for tomorrow night. It may turn out that it turns into a side-by-side workalong where I am using some old material and inserting a lot of new material. There is a secret that I am still trying to keep buried at this point that I may be able to handle without being so sterile about the language. I need to color the chapter up quite a bit or it’s going to turn into another Tom Bombadil. I will let you know how it all turns out.