Word choice

I closed my last post with, "Ghirardelli peppermint cocoa, I can report, is an excellent lucubrant." Lucubrant is not a word, and only appears on Google as a misspelling of "lubricant" (including in a poem that coins another great word, apparently accidentally: "motivating cranivals of lurid emotions") and some goofy demon name in an RPG. I did check before I posted, since I do my best to use words carefully, but it seems like such an obvious lack. Lucubration is late-night thinking or writing, literally "working by artificial light"; a lucubrant, it seems obvious, is something that facilitates lucubration, just as a roborant facilitates roboration (literally "a speech given by a robot").

So I have this goal for my lucubration: page 200 by the end of the year (which, realistically, means by December 23rd). That works out to a page and a half per day, which is not a pace I've previously been able to maintain for any length of time. But this is a series of scenes I've been thinking about for a long, long time, and for the last three nights I've averaged almost two pages. It's freedom through constraint — by setting a reasonable but uncomfortable pace, I push myself to get the scenes into words, without picking and agonizing as much as I typically do. Sometimes I forget that I'm writing a first draft; polishing not only can happen later, but must, because I don't quite yet know how each bit is going to fit into the whole.

Anyway — page 200. Ba-zoo.