For the advanced player, you can up the stakes of the novel game I outlined yesterday. Instead of having an absolute page number as a predetermined goal for each day's play, you can set each day's goal to be the previous day's ending page plus three. This way, if your day's goal was 33 and you stretched all the way to 35, your next day's goal would end up being 38 instead of 36.

I may get there later in the book, but for now I'm sticking with the absolute goals. In the middle of February I will spend a week traveling to places like Orlando and Milwaukee, and I plan to try to get far enough ahead by then that I don't have to worry about working full bore that week.

If you read between the lines of the previous two posts, you'll see that I was supposed to start writing the novel on Monday but didn't actually get underway until Tuesday. On Monday I ended up going back to a novelette I completed recently and extended it by a couple of pages. That's okay. I didn't quite catch up to where I was supposed to be on Tuesday, but yesterday I had a good run and not only caught up but gained a couple of pages. Finishing Chapter 1 put me on the middle of page 11. I read the chapter to Laura after her marathon-training run last night, and she said if she'd read it in a bookstore she would have had to buy the book and keep going.

This morning I bought a whole mess of 3x5 cards in different colors, tabbed 3x5 dividers, and a little 3x5 filing box. I'm making notes on characters, worldbuilding elements, and plot points, and filing everything by chapter. The terror of Chapter 1 is past, only to be replaced by the greater terror of Chapter 2.