Summer writing

Jordan has a summer writing assignment stemming from his birthday party: part of the charge for the party is that he write a 3000-word story, which the dungeonmaster will edit with him and submit to a youth writing contest. This is more than twice as long as anything else he has written. Awesome, right? When we agreed to this, we had all of summer before us... and then Jordan went out of town for upwards of six weeks. (Three weeks of Boychoir tour, one week of Boychoir overnight camp, and a week each of Aunt Kari camp and Grandma camp.) So hello, middle of August, and let's get started. 

The first time Jordan was invited to work on this he was pretty irritated. He felt like he was being punished for his birthday party! But he managed to give it a go, and found out a couple of things: (1) He can't write when he's mad, only when he has a positive attitude. Fortunately he is skilled at making this happen. (2) When he writes with a positive attitude, writing is fun and rewarding. These are excellent things to learn. Every day he tries to write a little more than the day before; he started out producing maybe 100 words in 30-40 minutes, then gradually got up to 150, then 200, and this morning wrote a killer 350 words in about that time. Wow! He is very impressed with himself and rightly so. 

He has encountered some obstacles. Some days he does not want to do it, and then gets mad, and then is really not in the space to do it, but still has to. This morning he solved the problem by writing in bed, under a blanket. It totally worked! He is up to 2400 words now.