While living and working in Edinburgh in 2008 I set out to write one million words in 366 days... but only managed 800,737.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Status Report: Week Forty-Two

Week Forty-Two – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 16,099 words (compared to 16,815 words last week)
Average: 2,300 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Saturday 18 October, 4,786 words
Least productive day: Sunday 19 October, 1,387 words
Year-to-date: 662,698 words (137,489 words behind target)

I had such a good day yesterday. I went to sleep confident I could replicate it today. But I woke up feeling drained rather than recharged. I could feel from the tightness of my jaw and the faint metallic tang of my mouth that I had been clenching my jaw all night. As I lay in bed, feeling like a piano had fallen on me, I ran through what I could recall of my night. Had my sleep been broken? Not that I remembered. Had I dreamt? Yeah. What about? Writing. What did you write? Everything I planned to write on Sunday (next scene in novel A, a poem based on this video and the fact the guy survived the Hindenburg disaster by similar means, this status report... though it was much more positive).

The problem with writing in your dreams it's gone when you wake up.

Occasionally a whacked-out image or a line of dream dialogue will be useful for conscious writing, but I have decided to bar my sub-conscious from the serious work of composition. By night, the daily grind of 4,500 words is just too much for my body, and teeth, to handle.

I still feel like a piano-drop victim as I type this...

But I still managed to knock up some graphs:


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