Sunday, November 10, 2013

Writing Update


the-writer2
Like many writers, I keep track of the number of words I write each day. I have a chart blue-tacked to the wall, with columns for each day and weekly totals. Today I finished filling in the details on yet another page of that chart. When I looked back over the chart, the last four pages had numbers in every box: I had written on every day since August 22, 2011, that’s 812 days in a row.

During those 116 weeks I wrote 257,070 words, an average of 316 per day. Most of those words were for the novel I am currently writing. I have added words to that manuscript on every day since the beginning of last November.

So I am keeping at least one writing goal of writing every day. But I would be a lot happier if it was 1,000 words a day. The only day during the past two and a bit years when I was close to not writing happened just two Monday’s ago, when a kidney stone made sitting at the computer very painful.

As Norman Mailer says: a real writer produces work even on bad days. 

The Novel 

So how is my epic novel going? I am currently writing chapter 103. A few months back I thought I was very close to the end, but then one of the characters screamed out for help. It took a while to work out how to save her. I then expected to quickly finish writing the novel, but one final twist, which could result in an even better ending, came to me. I estimate I have around 6,000 words to add to the 204,000 I have written.

At least I will have something to edit. 

Divine 

My latest article, Healing Words, went up on Divine last Friday week. After I had finished writing that article, I had no idea what to write next. The dread of running out of ideas seeped in, but then an idea popped into my head, one that would require a lot of research. Luckily, another idea came after reading about a new technology on the web. And yet another idea came from watching the local news. The first idea concerns music, and the last idea was health related. I have pitched two of the ideas to the editor and she has said yes. I plan to write the one on technology in the coming week.

If you were wondering, the pain from the kidney stone caused me to call a doctor for a late night home visit and a pain killing injection, but a few hours later the pain was back and I went to the local hospital’s emergency department. Fortunately, the hospital was very quiet at 4am and after some morphine, and a few hours sleep in a hospital bed and then at home, I passed the kidney stone. I was then once more happy to inhabit my body. 

3 comments:

Anthony J. Langford said...

So impressed with your work ethic Graham - that's an amazing achievement - not just the word count (three novels?) but to keep at it every day, despite your health issues and travelling and writing for Divine.

Editing is going to be fun!

Unknown said...

Good louck with editing that Graham! A task beyond all tasks... and like Anthony said, perhaps you have a trilogy there...?

Graham Clements said...

Anthony and Chris, you can expect a whole lot of posts about editing and redrafting in the not too distant future.