10,000 Words Minus 1,000

I am making mega mega progress on my manuscript this week. Having time off from work really really helps! Everyday that I can spend just writing and not having to be anywhere else is like the best day ever for me. So I basically spent the day with Courtney who has been my awesome writing buddy all week. We basically each sit at a different table with our lap tops and write in silence-unless I sneeze really loudly, which I tend to do every hour on the hour, or if we want to discuss a scene or an issue we're having with our writing.

So I've made my way to the almost end of chapter four-which is really exciting! I'm really pleased with where my manuscript is going and I ended up writing over 10,000 words today. Yay me!

But I had to delete about 1,000 -or rather I cut them and put them into their own document to now be known as a deleted scene. I realized something important today. I am a total plotter-I plot out everything in my story, but I do leave a very generous amount of elbow room. However, I always believed that the elbow room was for my characters to kind of allow them to come to life and tell their story. And I realized today, that they don't need so much room. I'm the writer, I'm their boss. And so those 1,000 words I deleted were from me letting my characters take the reign. I think I finally feel like I have enough authority to completely control my story-which is sort of liberating in a wierd way.

So after I finish watching the results of So You Think You Can Dance, I'm going to go back and finish chapter four!