Well, I’m bound to keep everyone up to date on my progress, but as fruitful as it is for me,  “I successfully sat down and wrote a lot of words in my novel” does not an exciting regular post make.

Word count thus far: 17,702

I have a little calendar hung above the computer on which I write the word count total and when I am feeling like things are not moving along fast enough I look up at that. An average novel has somewhere between 250-300 words on the page, which means I have written (hold on, calculator) – almost 60 pages. That makes it seem much larger somehow.

In the first week I was writing whatever sections of the novel I felt drawn to on that day, regardless of chronology, but for the next little bit I’m taking sections and plowing through them chronologically. Right now that means I’m writing a section that takes place between 1929 and 1932 and involves a large fire at an exhibition (this really happened in New Westminster in 1929), the terrors of learning to drive an automobile, long-distance wilderness walking, the practicalities of romance, and riding – and driving – an electric tram. Trams are an interesting subject; the push to bring back LRT, or light rail transit, would suggest that we should have kept the trams up and running in a lot of places. Also, rumour has it that a relative of mine was once a tram-driver.