I did a thing!

So, I've had an idea for a novel bouncing around in my head for 5+ years now (if not 10+ years.) A few years ago, I actually wrote out the first chapter, but then stopped and didn't do anything else with it. It's been on my "I Should Really Work On That" list forever.  It's been on my "I'm Definitely Going To Work On That Soon" list for a few months now. Well, tonight, I actually sat down and started it again. Not a huge chunk of writing--374 words over the course of an hour--but that was infinity percent more than I had been doing, so I'm calling it a win.

The writing itself went reasonably well. Most of the time when I write, I'll get through a few paragraphs, then go back and incessantly edit those paragraphs, and at the end of the writing session, I'll have two or three extremely well-edited paragraphs. Tonight I tried to let myself just tell the story and not edit too much, and I think I did a decent job with it. There was some editing, and some pausing to think about things, but overall I felt okay with how I did.

I'm using a program called celtx to write it, rather than just a normal word processor, because celtx lets me keep track of my writing sessions and tracks word count per session and a bunch of other stuff. The only thing it doesn't let me do is indent paragraphs. I checked their website, and apparently they no longer support the free desktop version I'm using; they've moved entirely to a cloud-based model, which apparently does let you indent paragraphs. There's supposedly a free version of the cloud model you can use, but I really prefer working on my desktop, outside of a browser. The point is, one day I'm going to finish this, export it to LibreOffice, and spend the next several days going through and hitting the Tab key. Bleh.

Oh, and just for the record, tonight's writing session was fueled by about 4 servings worth of dark chocolate-covered espresso beans. I may need to start buying those in bulk...