After a Slow Start

NoNoWriMo begins in twelve days. I won't be part of it because I don't (officially) have a 50,000-word novel to write. I have begun another story. And it's a safe bet it will make 50,000-words. But I've begun it already and it's a safe bet I will either finish it before the end of November, or I will abandon it in favor of another story.

Out of curiosity I just did a search through the computer to see what all I have written since the first of September. I have two active stories (both novels) and 13 finished works, which include two novels. Total word count over the past 50 days: 150,036-words.

Maybe I should sign up for McKoala's Smackdown Challenge. Nah.

My average daily output has been around 3,000-words. That seems low to me, until I consider days like the past four, when I don't think I have 3,000-words to show for the lot.

When I'm writing - on a roll, as I like to put it - I can easily pump out five or ten thousand words in a day. I've done more, but that's usually on days when I put in more than eight hours. Generally, I only put in a few hours every day. That's the up side of being unemployed.

I understand that my writing isn't the greatest, and I don't edit everything I write. Shadow People has only been through one edit pass and The Sweet Girl hasn't gone beyond the first draft. Those two books make up 129,000-words. My poems I seldom edit after I finish. I do that while I write. But those are nearly always less than 200-words.

My Evil Editor exercises (of which I have one in the past 50 days) do get a kind of edit. Mainly I'm looking for spelling errors and making sure I haven't exceeded the word limit.

Few of my short stories get edited much. The exception to this rule is Apprentice, which merits the effort. Apprentice, by the way, does NOT count toward my recent activity totals, so the four days I spent thus far on that can be deducted from the fifty.

With the exception of Apprentice, I'm not really in an editing mode right now. Right now I'm pumping out ideas and stories and not worrying too much about their quality. Editing will come later. Fall is when I seem to write the most. The ending of summer, green grass, and (supposedly) warm temperatures pushes me to nostalgia, which awakens my creative energies. Winter I edit. It's a dry time. Cold and stark. That's when I can rip apart what I've written and replace it with something supposedly better. Come spring new ideas spring to mind, but they're difficult to pin down and write. Summer is complete hard to write, but the story root systems are growing by leaps and bounds as my imagination works overtime without being encumbered by actual writing. Then comes fall again. Harvest time. Like the busy beaver I work like crazy to get as much done before the winter freeze puts a stop to all creative flow.

[long pause while I tallied something]

I've written 89 new projects this year. By new this year I mean I started all 89 after January 1, 2009. Four novels and two short stories are NOT finished. Everything else has at least a first draft completed.

I have 12-exercises; 2 finished novels; 4 unfinished novels; 53 poems; 16 finished short stories; and 2 unfinished short stories.

Total word count for the year: 195, 674.

That's pretty bad when you consider 150,000 was done in the past seven weeks, and I wrote the 200,000-word version of Swords of Fire in a month.

If I could write every month the way I write in September I would easily write over one million words in a year.

But who would read them?