Fanatical Pupil

6/4: 91
6/5: 0
6/6: 0
6/7: 257
6/8: 0
6/9: 0
6/10: 435

There are two things that worry me here: The first is that the bulk of those words (and there’s not that many of them) are on a new project that I just started a couple weeks ago. This follows my habit of starting a multitude of projects and not finishing them. The ability to actually finish a project is, of course, the main thing that separates people who get published from the people who have unfinished works sitting on their desktop forever.

The second thing worrying me is the lack of determination to write every day. As you can clearly see, I have not yet formed the necessary habit of writing every day. I’ve been posting to this blog nearly every day (though several of those posts came from drafts started a while ago), but that doesn’t count as “writing” because it’s not writing fiction. However, you can also see that the public shame (as it were) of posting my word counts led me to write 435 words which I might have just left for a later date if not for knowing that I had to post this. Yes, I know there’s approximately 2 people who read this blog, but even that is enough to push me to at least a weekly writing habit.

Yes, I’ve now written more than 30,000 words… too bad it’s spread across three different projects. This time, the 10,000th word was something just as interesting as she or date. For Hear the Grass Grow, the 10,000th word is: note.

And, I’m only 207 words behind my goal average of 500 per day. So, I’ve only fallen an average of 17 words per day since the first time I reached the 10,000 word milestone on 2/15 (exactly 2 months ago – and March was a pretty weak month for my writing; the counts for February and April look a lot better).

Tracer Photo:

So, I was off on vacation for part of last week and the week before. In the realistic part of my mind, I knew that I wouldn’t have time to come up with 10,000 words, even if I had brought my computer. Okay, maybe I thought somehow it would get done. Note the passive verb there.

I knew I’d have time on the plane, and at least one day while my wife was prepping for the wedding (she was a bridesmaid). And that was exactly the amount of time I had. I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing going on. I probably could have made more time if I’d really tried.

Anyway, in the 6 days we were gone, I got 1,114 words written for part of The Nine Mothers in my little Moleskine notebook. (avg: 186 words/day) Of course, writing by hand slowed me down to about 50% of my speed as compared to using a computer. I kind of thought it would slow me down more than that…

Of course, now that I’m back, I’ve decided to go back to working on a project I’ve been trying to do since high school. It’s gone through at least four different titles, but I believe my official title is now: Hear the Grass Grow, Sound the Ringing Horn. In the past two days (aka this weekend), I’ve written 848 words for that one. I think that’s pretty good considering I went out to lunch, took a nap, and went to a party yesterday, and then today was at church, followed by visiting family, followed by preparing for the coming work week.

I’ll get into more details about HtGG (as I now call it) when I actually get closer to releasing it into the wild.