keeping count

I’m beginning to lose myself in this novel. This morning I woke up with an image of the cover in my mind—black with a picture of Nyla in profile: shaved head, purple tints in her faux hawk, her many facial piercings done with silver foil. I keep a notebook next to my laptop and every few hours I stop to calculate my word count so I know how much progress I’m making. My goal is to write 10K words this month. The Deep is a novella like Ship of Souls, so it won’t be much longer than 30K words. In London I wrote over 2000 words and since the new year began, I’ve written an additional 5000. This past week I’ve fallen asleep on the couch more times than I can count, waking at 4 or 5am not sure what day it is, but with a scrap of dialogue ready to be written down. I love writing and it feels good to pull a chapter together—for more than a year I’ve been taking notes and writing bits and pieces, and now I’m finally filling in the gaps. Unfortunately I’m eating WAY too much sugar—I went two days without cake and in its place ate a bag of caramels purchased for $1 at Target, and then yesterday I woke before dawn and baked cookies. I have a sugar problem. But when I’m in the middle of a writing tear, I’m disinclined to make any drastic changes to my lifestyle. I went to the doctor on Thursday and she gave me a list of foods I need to avoid; half the items on her list aren’t even in my diet but the rest certainly are—no more chocolate! No orange juice, cranberry juice, peppermint, or tomato sauce. Today I’ll go for a run since it’s supposed to be a bit warmer, and my agent has advised me to start each day with 12 men’s pushups. “Don’t worry about how long it takes you,” she said, “just keep going ’till you get to 12.” My friends and I have agreed to try to have healthier food for our weekly Downton Abbey tea—some cakes, some scones, but fruit and sugarless options as well. I can’t afford to add a pound for every thousand words I write this month!