Our Days are Numbered

Counting today there are 40 days left in this year.

Thanks to Jen’s diligent work on stubs, we now know we have to write 30 scenes to complete Sibling of Music Novel.

With two of us writing, that’s 15 each.

December 31 makes an enticing deadline, but for our purposes it’s totally arbitrary. Choosing that date just because it’s at the end of the calendar is like deciding on your vacation destination because it’s precisely 100 miles from your house. In a perfect world we’d knuckle down and finish this bad boy before the end of 2019, but we’ve already accepted that this is an imperfect world and that’s not likely to happen. While it’s a bit disappointing to know we’re going to miss such a nice big obvious date, there’s a lot of satisfaction in knowing how much work is left.

In between painting the bedroom and wrangling the contractors we hired to do the projects involving finish carpentry and explosive gases, we kept plugging away at the novel. Kent concentrated on prose composition, and completed several scenes. Jen devoted herself to crafting stubs, and carried that project through to the end of the outline. The other night at quitting time, Kent had just finished his scene and was ready to decompress with a little TV. Jen only had one more stub to go. Since she had momentum, Kent just got out of her way and she finished in record time.

15 scenes each. It’s tempting to try to hit that arbitrary deadline.

A writing partner is someone who helps you find the right balance between writing and real life. And who will clean all the bathrooms before the guests arrive for Thanksgiving.