Status Report: Weeks Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight

The Stats

Fortnightly Wordcount: 14,069 words

Average: 1,005 words per day (only 2,000 words per day short...)

Most productive day: Sunday 13 July, 4,382 words

Least productive day: Take your pick (Excuse: visitors from afar / driving visitors from afar around Scotland)

Year-to-date: 460,398 words (72,389 words behind target)

I missed last night's regular status report slot as I discovered it was Bhutan night on BBC4. I watched way past my bedtime, furiously taking notes -- it's a country that fascinates me and will shortly feature in my fiction. Ideally, I'd spend two months researching there on the way home (sometime in 2009), but it's too darn expensive. Luckily I believe in the power of the imagination to fill the holes left by life experience.

Anyway. You can see from the graphs above that my slide continues. Slide may be too gentle a word for it. Plummet perhaps?

The simple act of tweaking the name of this blog (though sadly it's too much hassle to change the web address) has lessened the guilt I feel about my word counts. Thinking like a Tibetan Buddhist also helps: Desire leads to suffering. My desire to right 1,000,000 words in 366 days leads to suffering when I fall short (not to mention when I write a lot but neglect other duties nice, Karma-positive beings undertake, like helping with the washing up and socialising with workmates).

But there are silly, arbitrary desires like writing 1,000,000 words or wanting to spend the night with Megan Fox, and then there are the sorts of desires that lead to books being written or single span suspension bridges being built.

I guess my love of books and bridges will keep me spinning in the wheel of existence for at least one more incarnation.