.Writing for Monday, 2,131 words. Tuesday 1,295, Wednesday 991 words, Thursday 1,021 words, Friday, 1,903 words.
Writing for year: 12,915 words.
Writing goal for year: 375,000 words.
Comcast is truly evil. I’ve tried to make a post here fifty times this week, but my blogging software has timed out every last time. I’ve been able to get on forums a bit, but I have to click on a thread, wait five minutes, and then do the same for anything in the thread. Making a post takes even longer. Research has been almost impossible, and my writing has been slower this week because of this. It has not been fun. Comcast says they can’t find the problem, but one tech I’ve known a few years told me it’s an area wide problem, and he thinks more than one thing is wrong, which is why they’re having trouble getting everything up and running right. Something has to be done, but darned if I know what.
At any rate, I’m more or less combining this week’s posts. I’ll keep trying to post this one until it goes through, which I think should happen sometime today. I seem to be getting just a touch more speed, though it’s still unbelievably slow and unreliable.
But, writing for the week. Worked on “Second Time Around” on Monday, and again on Tuesday, and finished it after about seven hours of writing on Tuesday. At least four of those hours were spent waiting for research material to come up on the web. I thought the story would finish not too far from six thousand words, but I didn’t expect to to hit it exactly, but that’s what I did.
On Wednesday I started and finished a piece of flash fiction called “Eternal Love”. It came in at nine hundred and ninety-one words. I’m not sure what genre it falls under. Psychological thriller, more than likely. This, at least will be where I start submitting it.
On Thursday, I started write a crime story called “Cold October Wind”, This is a new story, but with an old title. So is “Eternal Love”, for that matter. When I really like a title, I tend to keep using it until a story with the title attached actually sells. Again, I spent too much time trying to do research, so it took the full five hours to write the 1,021 words. Yesterday, Friday, went a little bit better. I wrote 1,903 words in my five hours, and finished the story.
So far, so good, all things considered. I am falling a little bit behind because of the internet problems, but not badly so. I need to average 31,250 words per month, or 7,212 words per week. Or, to be even more exact, I need to average 1,660 words per writing day. If the math doesn’t sound right, it’s because of vacation time. Just like any profession, I think its a good idea for a writer to take scheduled time off, to actually take a vacation or two in order to refill the well, to recharge the batteries, to seed the imagination, or whatever analogy you prefer. While it seldom works out in the real world because of deadlines, or editor requests I can’t refuse, or something else, my goal is always to write two hundred and twenty-six days per year.
This means weekends off, two vacations per year of two weeks each, and about a week off at Christmas. This is a pace that lets me get quite a bit of writing done, but that also lets me pursue other interests, and lets me recharge, refill, seed, etc. Chances are excellent that I’ll go over this by twenty days or so, but rather than letting the extra days cut into vacation time, I work on some Saturdays, and the occasional Sunday.
I have a few projects scheduled for this year, but I’m doing a lot of free floating right now. The huge amount of nonfiction and business writing I had to do last year left little time for thinking about fiction this years. I know one of my pseudonyms has to write an MG novel, and i know I want to write a western novel. Or maybe just chapters and an outline. Other than this, I’m not at all sure. I do want to write more short stories than I did last year, but I think I’m mostly going to relax for a change, and just write whatever pops into my head.
Sincerely Yours,
James A. Ritchie
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