Day Two Train Wreck.

Writing for today: 2,574 words.
Writing for year: 5,574 words.
Today’s project: Short story entitled  “The Second Time Around”.
Writing goal for year:  375,000 words.

Train wreck describes this day perfectly.  Managed to get in my five hours of writing, but it took about twelve hours to manage it.  Part of the problem was needing lab work, and having to make an unexpected drive out of town, part of it was Comcast internet going on the fritz again, and part of it was unexpected company.  Not one of the best days I’ve ever had, and the year is just getting started.  Comcast is also why this didn’t get published yesterday.  Our home Comcast internet is supposed to deliver fifty megs per second, and right now we’re getting about one.  It’s ridiculous, but it’s the only high speed internet available where we live.
Anyway, despite the hectic mess, I started another mystery short story entitled “The Second Time Around”.  Wrote 2,574 words of it, but this one is going to go twice this long, and may finish somewhere close to 6,000 words, so I probably won’t finish it tomorrow.   In fact, tomorrow is Saturday, and the first weekend of the NFL playoffs, so I won’t write at all.  I’ll get back to this story Monday morning, but probably won’t finish it until Tuesday.
I did notice I failed to put my writing goal for the year in yesterday’s  post, so I’ve corrected it here.  It’s an extremely modest goal, but even this may be very difficult to achieve.  As much as I’d like to think otherwise, sometimes life can get in the way of writing.  I do believe there’s seldom, very seldom, a reason to let life stop  a writer from getting a decent amount of fiction written, but there are reasons to let life slow you down a bit.  Some of these reasons are good, some few are wonderful, some are bad, and some are catastrophic, but nothing short of death, or a truly horrible accident or disease, should stop a writer completely. 
Many writers know about NaNoWriMo, a challenge of writing fifty thousand words during the month of November.   Writers panic, write pure crap, copy and paste, and find all sorts of ways of saying they’ve accomplished this task, but, in truth, fifty thousand words in a month is not very fast, even for someone with a nine to five job and kids.    It’s 1,667 words per day.  Wow!  This coming year is likely to be one of my most challenging years for a fair number of reasons, which means I’m likely to get very little written.  By “very little”, I mean 375,000 words.  I write only five days per week, and only forty-eight weeks per year, so this works out to 1,669 words per day, which converts to doing NaNoWriMo  each and every month, but with only twenty or twenty-one days writing.  This is sloooooowww.
I wish more new writers would get over the speed problem.   Slow does not produce better writing, and if you aren’t average at least a thousand words per day, all year long, you’d better be in your death bed.   One good writer to read on this front is Dean Wesley Smith.  His blog shows how much you can do away from writing, and still get an amazing number of words written in a year.   http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/
Gotta run.  Have much left to do tonight, and little time to get to it.
Sincerely,
James A. Ritchie