Well, I’ve reached the end of my writing day, Day 1 of the write-a-thon. I churned out about 2900 words of the novel I’ll be writing this summer, which is an expansion of my Korean superheroes novella “Jjangguk and the Madman of Pyongyang.” That’s good time: I’ve committed to 15,000 words a week, and at this pace I should be able to do it in five days a week, with two days off. However, it’s good for me to bank some words in, since I have midterm exams for much of the day on Tuesday and Thursday, and on Wednesday afternoon as well.
By the way, if you’re wanting to pledge, feel free. There’s no deadline, and if at some point you start feeling inspired by my semi-daily updates, you can still pledge for me then.

That reminds me, I need to go make some notes for myself about a short story idea I had. I think I might even do a little work on another short story in progress, “McWar” before I call it a day and go do some grading. I’ll be counting that towards my weekly total since, if I do indeed meet my weekly quotas, I’ll still be left with about 10,000 words-to-write extra by the end of this thing, and might as well use them on short stories.

Last thing: I need to install the writing tracker in my sidebar so as to share my progress and pacing with anyone (?) interested.

The working title of the novel, by the way: To the Happy Country… Unfortunately, the title works better in Korean, where it’s a riff on a famous protest song with the same kind of sad, utopian mood I’m working at. But ah well… that’s why it’s a working title.

UPDATE: I put in 500 words on McWar, which means I’m now at 3400 words for today. Sounds like a find place to stop.