Buffalo Park

Today I took a five minute drive to Buffalo Park. It's a nice place for a stoll and many of the locals come here to walk their dogs, run, and to do the exercise circuit (there are exercise stations along the trails for doing pushups, crunches, wall climbing, rope climbing ect.). I wasn't feeling too great today so I just walked and took pictures. The sunlight in Autumn is very dramatic and the grasses and oaks were lit up.

This grass is a native called blue gramma. The inflorescences curl as they dry and the fluffy seeds are let loose to the wind. You can see the dark purple, straight inflorescences that aren't mature yet. It's common in Flagstaff and could probably be found in Utah, Idaho, and Southern California (so keep a look out, family and friends).

A writing update:

I kept up with my writing goals (see previous post) and reached 6,840 words (that's twelve pages, so I more than doubled the number of pages I had a week ago.)

The writing is more like a combination of prose, notes, and stream of conciousness. So it's not exactly elegant prose, but this kind of writing is necessary at the beginning. It's helped me to develop the plot, characters, themes, and structure of the novel.

On average, I wrote 506.4 words a day (throwing out one of the days because on that day I wrote for an hour).

By my calculations:

500 words/day x 7 days/week x 10 weeks till Christmas = 35000 words. One page single space is about 540 words, so I will have about 65 poorly written, but useful, pages pertaining to my novel by Christmas Day if I contue to write for an half hour each day. Plus, the twelve I already have. Not bad, eh? It'd be a good start.