Happy progress

Now that school is out and I don’t have any pressing obligations to keep me busy, I’m making some excellent progress on my writing.  Really good progress, actually.  I revised about five thousand words today, which, according to openoffice’s wordcounting algorithm, puts me at 73% finished.  

Wow.  At that rate, I could be finished with the 2.0 revision of Genesis Earth by the end of the week.  I could finish the 3.0 version before the second weekend in May and get it out to all my beta readers by then.

Today, I went up to campus in the morning and had a liesurely, enjoyable day.  I set up camp at an LRC computer and just wrote for six hours, with about a forty five minute lunch break in between.  No other worries, no other obligations, pressing appointments, places to be…it was great.

I finished reading through Genesis Earth 1.0 a couple of days ago, and there was this conversation between my two main characters that really stood out to me.  They’re both on foot, headed towards a village of primitive, native peoples on a distant planet. Terra turns to Michael, the viewpoint character, and asks him, point blank, “are you happy?”

It’s not like the main character is depressed or anything, it’s just that, up to this point, he hasn’t really taken the time to think about himself, to think about why he does what he does.  Most of what he does, he does it for other people, or for some grand cause, or for something outside of himself.  He does that so much, in fact, that he doesn’t ever really notice whether he’s happy at what he’s doing, or satisfied,  or fulfilled.  Terra’s question forces him to think about where he is, what he’s doing, and evaluate whether his work, his cause, his chosen mission really does give him happiness.

Well, I asked myself that question as I was hanging out in the LRC, and I’ve got to say it makes me really happy to just write.  To immerse my mind in the story or project at hand and have that be my primary concern.  I was very happy today, just working on my own writing, at my own pace, and not having anything or anyone screaming at me to do anything else.

We’ll see how that changes over the next few days and weeks.  It will be an interesting summer if I end up in Provo, working on my writing and hitting up some of the cons out here.  It’ll definitely know if I can be truly happy and fulfilled with this writing lifestyle.