Writing Update

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.