On slowing down...

Well slowing down is more dangerous for me than it is for you, Adam, since you're so many words ahead. That's why it pays off being such a good student in the first week! I have a feeling (and an inside source -- a.k.a. Barbara) that this is where the going gets rough, since we lose the momentum we started with, and though we have a lot of words, we still have to figure out how to make them into a full-fledged novel. I'm behind again, though not as bad as earlier this week, and I'm hoping to catch up by cheese-time. To help me, not only with the word count, but also so that my fingers keep typing, I've started to write out my thoughts when I get stuck. It may be a little bit of a stretch to count those words, but it's certainly better than copy/pasting one line hundreds of times. Here's a passage from today:

Okay, an animal that’s a cross between a phoenix, a lamb, and what else? Body of a phoenix so it can fly wooly head of a lamb that bleats and the ass of what? If I were an animal with the head of a lamb and the body of a phoenix, what in the hell would I want my ass to look like? Well it would need a tail to help me navigate in the air, but not a limp hairy tail like a horse’s and not a stick-like tail like a dog. I don’t want to make it another bird, but what has a tail – ooh! Something aquatic, like the tail of what? And it has to dive down periodically to wet its ass in the water, oh I love it! So the head of a lamb, the body of a phoenix, and the tail of an otter. Sure, an otter. So lamb phoenix otter what’s the name of the chimera that combines the three? Phlattix? Laphoetter. It could eat laughs out of the air, but is the word too unwieldy? Oh, hell, just go with it!