The good news: I wrote the first two scenes of the Pismo story today.

The bad news: I only wrote the first two scenes of the Pismo story today. There are fifty-six scenes in the outline and thirty days in June. That means I need to write an average of two scenes a day. Two scenes today: I haven’t banked any scenes for busier days to come.

The first scene was easy. I had already given it a lot of thought. The second was maddening. In my outline, I had written, “Exposition: describe the restaurant,” which wasn’t nearly enough meat for an entire scene. A sentence, maybe. I spent half an hour or so writing elaborate curses to myself until I invented enough business to build a scene around. I imagine that will happen a lot. Some of my outline notes are easy to write to; others not so much.

I also transcribed a few scenes from the longhand draft of the troll story using Dragon Naturally Speaking, which worked incredibly well. I used an earlier version of the software in the mid-1990′s to transcribe a book’s worth of interviews when tendinitis kept me from typing. Ten years seem to have brought lots of speed and accuracy improvements. Typing my longhand drafts is a chore. Dictating seems to take most of the sting out of it.