My "ideal" reader.

Reading Stephen King's list of things writers should do.

One of them is to find your "ideal" reader.

Well,  I've got one in Linda.

I read my two newest scenes from Fairy Punk to her last night and her comment was, "That's very good."

That's the kind of thing she'll most often say. (But she'll also point out if I've gone off track.) She and I are just really simpatico in what we like. It's just very encouraging to get that little pat on the head every day.

I've come to rely on it.

I've reached 99 thousand words on Fairy Punk. I have about 5 chapters (out of 40) that still need the "Memoirs of Joseph Tindermaker" headings, that that probably takes me to 100K at this point in the book before rewriting.

I have the entire conclusion yet to write. This book is going to be somewhere between 110 and 120K words, or over 400 pages. That's a big book for me, especially since I wasn't expecting it.

I've just sort of allowed my imagination to really let go this time--just write whatever the fuck I feel like writing. My process has really gotten refined. I've created the conditions for me to write. (Loner that I am...)

Refined it almost too much in that I'm really depending on my 5 mile walk in the Badlands to kickstart my writing every day. For the last two days I tried writing at home and could only eke out a few hundred words. Went out walking and somewhere around the 1 mile mark, the ideas start flowing. This seems to happen just about every time.

I posit what I'm after, or question which things I need, or challenge my subconscious to create answers to problems, and sure enough, they start to trickle in. Just a little snippet of an idea at first, then another one, then another. When they reach so many ideas I'm afraid I'm going to forget them, or when they start to form into concrete words, I have to stop and find a stump to sit on and to write.

Then I come home and read to my "ideal" reader.

A little pat on the head from Linda to savor until the next day.