Hello, and welcome to the first Writerly Monday post!  Yes, it’s Tuesday (I’m not so Writerly that my head is lost in the clouds about what day it is), but hey, I did not have a blog on Monday.  I just had a writing journal.  Now that I have a blog, well, the boundaries of the world have melted, and Tuesday has become Monday, and even though there’s a very disturbing song called I Don’t Like Mondays, I do like Mondays, because I get to muse on writerliness. 

Yesterday was a very thought-provoking day in my writing, because I started to ask myself, is this too easy?  (Pause to duck while other writers throw tomatoes.)  Yes, I know that’s kind of a hideously obnoxious question, but believe me, I’m sure I will not ask it often.  In fact, if the power of the blog is really such that the boundaries of the world melt away, I may at some point try to go back in time and throw tomatoes at my own self. 

It was, though, an extraordinarily productive day.  I revised a wee bit and wrote 11 pages of what I call The Camping Book, aka The Book of the Dead.  On most days, if I’m really going great guns (a term borrowed from my slightly odd college counselor), I can write 5 pages; other days, I’ll settle for 1,000 words–roughly 2-3 pages.  (Why are we wordsmiths so numbers-obsessed sometimes?  I guess everyone has to have a goal.) Anyway, as you can see, 11 pages is kind of gnuts.  Why was I so productive? 

I’m thinking it’s because I spent the total of two weeks outlining in September, and then I dedicated a whole other slew of time to elaborating on it two weeks ago.  I got to a point where I could push myself to answer the questions, “Who should this scene belong to?  What will be the tension in this scene?  After this scene, what will we be burning to know next?” 

So hooray for outlining, as it provided me a map to guide my productive driving these last few days.  Still, though, I wonder if I’m leaving out something major that will smack me in the face when I revisit these pages.  Will I discover that, somehow, it’s really boring?  I already know I need to go back and add visual description.  I’m just going to hope that the pages are at least half as good as they were easy.  That seems like an okay kind of math, right?