Writing: 1,088 words
Dean Wesley Smith wrote in February of 2009 that "most professional writers can average about one thousand words an hour."
I was with him all the way up to that last word. The thought of trying to produce a thousand words in one hour terrifies me like an unimaginable mirage over a distant Arrakeen sand dune. Most days I'm just grateful to cross the thousand-word threshold of what Stephen King says I should be producing in a day.
On some of those days, that time spent staring into the cyclopean eye of a laptop screen like a junkie in an opium den feels absolutely interminable. There's no way around the fact that in the deepest sub-basement of my psyche, I am an addict. It is one of the fundamental aspects of my personality, and I have accepted that. I have channeled it into one of the least desctructive outlets I have at my disposal: writing.
But, dammit, struggling just to get thirty more words out at one o'clock in the morning felt like taking a bad trip down a broken road in a beat-up car. I fought through it last night, and it took five hours to make it out the other end, but I wrote 1,088 words to complete two more sections and bring the manuscript up to a total of 81,696.
The sequence that I'm writing now is one that I envisioned only in the last year or so, in order to provide a more decisive motivation for Michael's flight to the Atlantic. It is also probably going to be the most brutal part of the novel for me to write even though it will require the least creativity. Maybe because it will require the least creativity.
Because this book is certainly a lie, but the story is true.
I was with him all the way up to that last word. The thought of trying to produce a thousand words in one hour terrifies me like an unimaginable mirage over a distant Arrakeen sand dune. Most days I'm just grateful to cross the thousand-word threshold of what Stephen King says I should be producing in a day.
On some of those days, that time spent staring into the cyclopean eye of a laptop screen like a junkie in an opium den feels absolutely interminable. There's no way around the fact that in the deepest sub-basement of my psyche, I am an addict. It is one of the fundamental aspects of my personality, and I have accepted that. I have channeled it into one of the least desctructive outlets I have at my disposal: writing.
But, dammit, struggling just to get thirty more words out at one o'clock in the morning felt like taking a bad trip down a broken road in a beat-up car. I fought through it last night, and it took five hours to make it out the other end, but I wrote 1,088 words to complete two more sections and bring the manuscript up to a total of 81,696.
The sequence that I'm writing now is one that I envisioned only in the last year or so, in order to provide a more decisive motivation for Michael's flight to the Atlantic. It is also probably going to be the most brutal part of the novel for me to write even though it will require the least creativity. Maybe because it will require the least creativity.
Because this book is certainly a lie, but the story is true.