I’m starting to think the daily update might get tedious, so I’m going to keep updating the one-post a week and go with that.

So: Wednesday’s progress is as follows:

McWar: 1,381 words

To the Happy Country: 1,129 words

Daily Total: 2,501 words

Total words Week 1 (so far): 10,304 words

The tough thing, of course, is that progress is going much better for McWar than for To the Happy Country…, but To the Happy Country… is the main project, and the first draft of McWar should be done in a day or two, so I shall have to well-and-truly buckle down for To the Happy Country…

Ah well, I can see that as a good thing.

See this space later for more updates!

UPDATE (Thursday, July 21st):

Today, I produced:

McWar: a mere 513 words

To the Happy Country: 1,530 words

Daily Total: 2,043 words

Total words Week 1 (so far): 12,347 words

I’m listening to North Korean folksongs (yeah, that’s a 3CD set!), old-timey sad Korean songs masterfully remade by Han Young Ae, and vicious she-zombie techno as I write, which is definitely having an effect on my story. I was also hoping to receive a certain book on North Korea but it looks like it’s going to be a bit longer, unfortunately. I should be able to wing things for a while more — the interviews with high-level defectors are making me rethink the kind of life my North Korean character might manage to live. We’ll see.

I was also shocked to discover a story set in the same prison camp in North Korea that I was writing about — especially such a well-written one, so recently published — but then,  it looks like we were cribbing from the same major source — Kang Chol Hwan’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang. Anyway, I was thinking of setting it in another, fictional camp, for reasons specific to my narrative: it frees me up in some ways, changes the game a little, and lets me work in other things I want for later on in the story.

This business of writing novels, I tell you… it’s like juggling endless streams of ideas and materials. Juggling as a form of sorting and discarding while keeping the sharpest, flashiest, and most fascinating of the random objects in constant motion.