Oh! The Outpouring!

Two days, 8,701 words. As they say on the day of the Michigan-Michigan State game, holy cow! Where did that geyser come from? YT must really have been ready to let it all hang out this year.

Some of the reason must be the planning. YT made about 8 pages of notes over the course of several lunch hours and evenings, full of ideas about the characters and some of the scenes. There was even a kind of bullet-point business plan for E-Style, a frame for all the stuff that will happen inside the company. Not to be too historically accurate, the idea here is that the dot-com company is sniffing around the beginnings of what we see now on Amazon or Netflix: "People who bought this book also bought..."

With all this background, the first two chapters - yes, all these words in two chapters! - were about the dealmaking to fund the company, and then how it got going as a real concern. With all the detail, some if it is dull and didactic. Well, most of it. But a steady tap-tap-tap did the trick. There will be an excerpt or two down-blog soon.

Given the planning and outlining starting this year, much of the credit for the huge word count has to go to yWriter 3. Past entries here have noted how writing goes quickly when YT gets "in the zone," or "the characters start speaking for themselves." This is Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow, where a person becomes fully immersed in his task, and the outer world falls away. It's easier to experience than to describe, but trust your friendly blogger here. Good tools can help a person enter the state of flow, and yWriter definitely has that character of "tool-ness." Other people have praised it online in fairly purple prose. YT hasn't used half the features, which look like they're aimed at someone far more organized, but he will say that it just works. After two days this writer is sold.

Of course, latent talent, or sheer perverse wordiness, perhaps, has a lot to do with this early success. So does taking a couple of vacation days just to write.

Word count after 2 days: 8,701