2008: The Year of Eight Hundred Thousand Words - - Summary Extravaganza

800,737 words

My total has not moved since 20 December, but I have. I've spent Weihnachten / Christmas in Northern Germany, and now I'm in Florence for Anno Nuovo / New Years. I'll be in Rome and Cairo for my birthday (I wonder if any customs officials will wish me happy birthday?), Honduras for Waitangi Day, and probably Argentina for Easter.

I haven't arrived at any New Year's Resolutions for 2009 yet as I'm still getting over 2008's.

Which brings me to:

How I Got To 800,737 words...

From 2 January to 22 March 2008 I was ahead of target. Those were the days. The blue flatlining at the end of the year is a bit depressing / misleading. I recommend you focus more on the steepness of the section that just precedes it.

Breaking it down further...

And further still...

(Week 50 stands out, don't it?)

And further still? Okay...

It was neck and neck between Sunday and Tuesday for a long time. In the end, Sunday contributed 420 more words than it's weekday rival. I'm still shocked that Tuesday did so well. I guess it's because there's never anything to do on Tuesdays except write, and I still have a bit of energy left from the weekend without it being a Monday...

By taking out all the days I was away from home, Sunday clearly outperformed the rest (adjusted average of 2,807 words versus Tuesday's 2,619).

But it would be remiss of me not to address the fact I was aiming for 1,000,000 words and not 800,000.

As Mike LaFontaine would say, Wha' Happened?



Excuses

2008 contained no less than seven international trips, ranging from long weekends to nine day absences from my desk: Madrid, Norway, Paris, Turkey, Greece, Estonia/Latvia and now Germany/Italy (and beyond). Then there were the trips within Scotland exploring the Highlands and Hebrides, and the day trips, and the shows during festival...

The link between travel and the ever-widening gap between me and my target was summed up pretty well by this graph from back in week 39:

But travel wasn't the whole story. There were 43 goose eggs in 2008 (days when I wrote no words) - - all travel related. But if I had those 43 days again, I'd still need to write around 4,600 words a day to crack the million. The longest span over which I averaged that many words was eight days => Verdict: unlikely.

There was, of course, the dreaded day job to contend with. Or day jobs. After an extended Christmas break, I started a six-week temp job in mid-Jan. Queue first drop-off. Then, in March, I moved straight into a more difficult job. I still spent the same amount of time away from home, but I was left with much less energy in the evenings (and less time to dream up things to write about while filing...).

But travel and employment aren't really excuses. I don't regret the places I've been or the money daytime drudgery has earnt. I always knew writing had to fit in around life: the Quest For A Million Words came about as a way of shifting writing up the list of priorities (however artificially), and in that respect it was a success.

But there were other 'contributing factors' to my failure to reach one million words:

My inability to commit to, and finish, a novel-length narrative. Perhaps it was due to the pressures imposed by this scheme (which I devised to force me to finish another novel). Perhaps it was the difficulty inherent in writing a novel in evenings and weekends? (If and when I jump back on that Clydesdale, I'll look long at hard at doing it without working a day job).

Or perhaps I wasn't ready to write another novel? Perhaps I'm just not built for them?

Related to my cooling off with the novel as a form, was my increasing interest and passion for shorter forms, both in prose and poetry. Short stories yielded me my biggest success of 2008 (though my collection won't be published till 2010), and they made up the biggest chunk of my writing pie this year (see below), but I don't think I could have written much more that 300,000 words of short fiction this year, or any other year. There are only so many ideas you come up with, and only a percentage of these stand up to being put on the page, and only some of these warrant sticking with and revising...

Same goes for poetry, though it's more pronounced due to the lack of WORDS in them...

I don't regret any of the time I spent on poetry or short fiction, so I cant turn around now and say I wish I tried harder with Novel A and Novel B. They'll still be there when I'm ready.

Recipie for an 800,737 word pie

Blogging is a rather large constituent. I expended about as many words writing about my travels for friends and family on my travel blog as I did on Novel A. I probably didn't put as much care and attention into those posts as I did in my rock'n'roll novel rewrite, but when I read over some of the 'improvements' I thought I was making to the novel, I was clearly way off base. On the other hand, when I read over some of my travel blogs, I don't cringe as much as I would suspect (typos aside), and find that without churning out 2,000 words of "We did A, then went to B, then had C for dinner..." I would have forgotten some details which might one day wriggle their way into my fiction (or poetry).

The moral: travel blogs (and update-type emails, see larger green segment) contain some value and deserve to be included in the word count.

As for blogging here, sometimes it has been a postive, sometimes a negative. The weekly wordcount updates helped push me along, but sometimes it all felt a bit too public. I'm liked having a place to air my thoughts about short story competitions, or the evolution of my musical tastes, or nuwanubianism... but wonder now if there shouldn't be a cooling off period before some things get posted, and an expiry date after which some posts cease to exist.

And since this blog, with it's quest-y title and optimistic and soon-to-be-outdated url, is so 2008, I have a decision to make: continue to blog here, create a new blog (with another gimmick?), or lapse into silence...?

It's a decision I am yet to make.

For now, the Quest For A Million Words remains open. I will appear at random intervals to post photos and perhaps even anecdotes from my travels. When I have a job and a place to live back in New Zealand, and have sent of the final manuscript for my short story collection (title still to be determined), things should be clearer.

But for now, here's some photos from Germany...

Status Report: Week Fifty-One

[Since my landlord's laptop has OpenOffice software rather than Microsoft Office, the graphs look a bit different this week.]

Week Fifty-One – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 13,957 words (compared to 30,863 words last week)
Average: 1,994 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Monday 15 December, 4,141 words
Least productive day: Sunday 21 December, 0 words
Year-to-date: 800,737 words

This post was written on Saturday, but, thanks to the wonder of post scheduling, is appearing on Sunday: technically the last day of week 51 and the last day I woke up in Edinburgh.

Hence the goose egg for Sunday.

Apart from the occasional post on my travel blog and an email here or there, it's going to be goose eggs all the way to April 2009.

No fiction. No poetry. No rambling blog posts about Muriel Spark or The National.

I don't know if I can go cold turkey.

I may have to write hundred word stories on restaurant menus, sonnets on ticket stubs, grand ideas for Novel C on the back of my hand...

Week 51 was quite a come down from the record-breaking of its predecessor. Too many errands to perform. Too many people to catch up with one last time. Too many things I never got around to fighting for my attention.

Seems a shame to end 2008 on a downer, writing-wise.

But hey, I made it to 800,000 words. That's 80% of a million words. Or 2,188 words per day. If you take out the 46 days (past and future) in 2008 when I was unable to write due to being outside the UK, the average becomes 2,502 words per day.

But I'll hold back on further number crunching until my graph extravaganza.

Status Report: Week Forty-Nine

Weeks Forty-Nine – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 12,085 words (compared to 16,163 words last week)
Average: 1,726 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Sunday 7 December, 3,117 words
Least productive day: Friday 5 December, 703 words
Year-to-date: 755,915 words

Week forty-nine was a paltry one, there’s no escaping the fact. But whatever. I still have a long list of things to sort out before we fly out on the 21st, BUT I don’t have that pesky day job any more. Suddenly, time is less of a problem. It’s just a matter of finding the motivation, inspiration, and perseverance to write 2.5 short stories and sundry summary materials I deem appropriate.

Additional Number Crunching

2008 Writing Days Remaining: 13
Required Daily Wordcount to Crack 800,000 Words: 3,391 words per day
Target for the Next 13 Days: 5,000 words per day (why the heck not?)

So what if I haven’t written over 5,000 words in a day since the first of March? I have all the ingredients: defined project(s); defined goal; deadline; time... I feel I should be knocking wood as I type this, but I can’t risk a knuckle injury at this late stage!

Status Report: Week Forty-Eight

Weeks Forty-Eight – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 16,163 words (compared to 15,561 words last week)
Average: 2309 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Wednesday 26 November, 4,284 words
Least productive day: Friday 28 November, 650 words
Year-to-date: 743,830 words (171,470 words behind target)

There was a spike on Tuesday and Wednesday while Marisa was away for work. I was able to build my evenings around my writing, rather than write around other things. I’m looking forward to the fortnight between finishing work and leaving Edinburgh almost as much as the recommencement of our world tour. Almost.

There are several things I’d like to achieve before 21 December:

* Write my 800,000th word. (Not a million, but it’s something).

* Finish first drafts of two new stories and the expansion of another, hopefully for inclusion in my short story collection. I’m not too worried about the level of polish at this stage, as two of the three stories have scenes set in places I haven’t been yet (Boston; Lima) but will have visited by the time I have to submit the final manuscript (June 09).

* Some sort of Year of Eight Hundred Thousand Words summary blog entry or entries. Lots of graphs, pointless statistics, spelling mistakes: just like the rest of the year. And something about living in Edinburgh: the digested read.

* Submit as many poems and short stories as I can for publication in print and online. I did a similar thing before leaving the Southern Hemisphere in May-June 2007… it seemed to work pretty well. I think my strike rate was 8 publications submitted to: 1 rejection, 6 acceptances, 1 no reply. Having a lot my writing under my belt, I’ll probably (hopefully) be submitting to more than 8 publications this time… we’ll see how my hit-rate goes.

This being the final day of November, and thus the final day of this month’s experiment (write a 100 word story every day), expect some sort of post-mortem tomorrow.

Status Report: Week Forty-Seven

Weeks Forty-Seven – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 15,561 words
Average: 2,223 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Sunday 23 November, 3,116 words
Least productive day: Tuesday 18 November, 1,717 words
Year-to-date: 727,667 words (168,508 words behind target)

Life, or preparation for life after the U.K., has impinged on my writing time all week, and will do so for the rest of the year. I wish I could stop checking the GBP-Euro and GBP-USD exchange rates (scary bad) but I can’t. I wish I could just pay whatever price for a memory card or for shipping a box of mementos to NZ but I can’t. I’m too cheap. And, having paid for all our flights and pre-booked tours, there’s not a lot of room for frivolity. Still, it’s all worth it, eh?

Status Report: Weeks Forty-Five and Forty-Six

Weeks Forty-Five and Forty-Six – The Stats

Fortnightly Wordcount: 19,286 words (compared to 19,214 words in week forty-four)
Average: 1,378 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Sunday 16 November, 4,641 words
Least productive day: 8-13 November October, 100 words each day (see November experiment)
Year-to-date: 712,106 words (164,943 words behind target)

If you took out the seven days travelling, you be left with a decent week’s wordcount. But, if it weren’t for the seven days travelling, I wouldn’t have anything to write about on my travel blog and no concerts to review here and I still wouldn’t have had a feijoa since 2006…

I promise I won’t mention Dave Wyndorf or Monster Magnet again this year. However, after posting yesterday’s review I have been thinking a lot about how my tastes have changed since the Y2K bug failed to bite. So tomorrow there’ll be a sort of review of Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff which is really just another veiled navel gaze.

Oh goody.

Status Report: Week Forty-Four

Weekly Wordcount: 19,214 words (compared to 10,908 words last week)
Average: 2,745 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Thursday 30 October, 3,820 words
Least productive day: Saturday 1 November October, 450 words
Year-to-date: 692,820 words (145,978 words behind target)

Two months to go… Well, less than two months of writing as we’re leaving Edinburgh on 21 December and will be living out of our backpacks until March or April 2009 (several variables yet to be tied down).

It’s pretty clear this won’t be the year I write one million words* (at least according to the rules I set up back in December… I’m sure I’ve written the words, “Yesterday you passed the following banking: [screenshot]… There was no outstanding credit in the X account, so the above banking has created an outstanding debit. Please pass corrective banking today,” five hundred times this year).

But.

News received this week has vindicated this ridiculous task… I won’t go into details until I know details, but let’s just say that the pie segments devoted to Short Fiction up to September were not just for the sake of graphs and word counts.

Was that cryptic enough? Perhaps I should just delete that whole paragraph… Nope, seems like I’m not going to.

Oh, I remember why I went down that path: to (partially) explain the large ‘Other’ slice in this week’s pie: a lot of ‘Hey, I got good news…’ emails this week.

I also sent off a poetry manuscript for the Crashaw Prize and an application for something writing-related…

Deadlines and vindication: two of the best word count boosters known to mankind.

*If you were wondering, I would have to write 6,400 words a day for the next 48 days to crack seven figures by 21 December. Unlikely given I’ve only written more than 5,000 words in a day three times this year (5,260 on Jan 26 being the highest single day wordcount).

Status Report: Week Forty-Three

Week Forty-Three – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 10,908 words (compared to 16,099 words last week)
Average: 1,588 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Monday 20 October, 3,308 words
Least productive day: Saturday 25 October, 756 words
Year-to-date: 673,606 words (146,066 words behind target)

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:

Status Report: Week Forty-One

While not as bad as last week, number forty-one was another sub-par effort, though for different reasons than those I wallowed in last week. No, I actually felt stories bubbling up inside of me. I was less tired. My time was more my own. The problem, this time, was reading.

I am normally reading three books at once. One is the audiobook I listen to while travelling to and from work. One I leave at work and read during my lunch breaks. Another I read at home. Now that we have our own bathroom, I have split the last category in two, leaving one book in the bathroom, and one beside my bed.

On a given week, I would expect to read 100-150 pages of my lunch time book, anywhere from 50-200 pages of an at-home book, and listen to about 7 hours of an audiobook (which corresponds to 180 pages at a rough guess). That’s an average week.

I don't think that's a lot. In fact, when I allow myself to think about life after this million words malarkey, I usually feel that I could pull back on some of the writing (less blog posts and graph making, less rookie poetry), and spend more time reading books.

But, even in the Year of Circa 800,000 Written Words, all it takes is one book to bump writing from my top priority.

On Monday I finally received my contributor’s copies of The Best New Zealand Fiction Volume Five. They were posted a month ago, but to my old address. So the anticipation had rather built. In fact, it is now more than a year since I got an email from Owen Marshall asking if I would like to submit anything, so the arrival of the finished product was a long timing coming. (I once had a dream that a full-blown Scot from work who’d never been to NZ also got a story into the collection, and I was outraged…)

After scanning the introduction for the appearance of my name (I’m only human) I quickly got sucked into the other stories. One of the first things I noticed was BNZF5 is ordered by author’s surname, as was the last edition of Sport. This is fine. I tend not to read short story collections or literary journals in a linear fashion. The beauty of such books is that you can jump around. You have 15 minutes left of your bus journey so you flick through and find a four page story. You aren’t really in the mood for a story in the second person, so you read instead about a trip to Morocco. Having an arbitrary order seems to encourage such behaviour.

Jumping in and out of these stories got me excited about reading again. Every spare moment felt like a book should fill it. I looked at the poetry I was bashing out and decided I’d rather be reading finished products from better poets than myself. On Saturday I went to the Scottish Poetry Library and again struggled to limit myself to six books. (Along with this exercise, the SPL is one of the main offenders when it comes to explaining my sudden obsession with writing and reading poetry).

The books I am currently reading now looks like this:

The Blind Assassin is my audiobook. The two Bond novels I found in the closet of our new flat and they had been my bathroom and bedside books until BNZF5 arrived, and they look set to be relegated further with all that poetry around. The one book not pictured is Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, which is in my desk at work.

With any book, but especially with poetry, I can’t stand to have it lie around without at least having read a few pages. With the Miłosz and the Geoff Cochrane, this ended with me reading the whole books through. (I have now read all of GC’s poetry collections from 1992 to the present; again, thanks to the SPL).

So my reading is all over the place. Writing seems less exciting: I might not know exactly what’s going to happen, but I at least have a modicum of control. This week, at least, control was something I could do without.

At some stage, I hope to talk about what’s actually gone on inside some of these books…

But until then…

Week Forty-One – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 16,815 words (compared to 12,007 words last week)
Average: 2,402 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Sunday 12 October, 3,347 words
Least productive day: Wednesday 8 October, 1,458 words
Year-to-date: 646,559 words (134,822 words behind target)

Status Report: Week Forty

Week Forty – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 12,007 words
Average: 1,715 words per day (compared to 2,529 last week)
Most productive day: Tuesday 30 September, 3,660 words
Least productive day: Saturday 4 October, 283 words
Year-to-date: 629,784 words (132,511 words behind target)

Last week was a down week, no denying. There are plenty of things at which I can point my finger, both mental and physical, but it felt as if something else, something less definable, was enveloping everything. Here’s my attempt to put it into a graph:

It’s the grey ring that’s the real problem. I’ve called it Cyclic Intangibles because I feel it is part of a cycle. At a writing high (see Week 35), it feels as if the planets have aligned. I have time and space to write. Everything feels settled. I have motivation, perhaps a specific, achievable goal. But there’s something more. As if planets really have aligned and all that astrology carry-on is the business. As if there really are muses. As if the universe wants me to write!

At the lows (see Week Forty), it feels as if the universe thinks writing is a monumental waste of time. As if, just to spite me, the transit of Venus is messing with my Feng Shui and all that carry-on is the business. In a low the obstacles to writing are more than the sum of the constraints on your time and energy. On top of everything -- or more correctly, surrounding everything -- is a fine mist of ugh. Trying to write (meaningfully, purposefully) in a low feels like Saturn trying to burst through its own rings of ice and dust.

But for some reason, I can write poetry whilst surrounded by a ring of ugh. *Brief pause to consult first pie chart.* I think this is because poetry is used to being surrounded.

SCENE: Half a dozen squad cars pull into a motel carpark, sirens blaring. Novels and DVDs and Playstation Games get out of the squad cars, guns drawn, and encircle a single sheet of browning paper. A ghost-written James Patterson Novel with a megaphone: “Alright, Poetry, we have you surrounded.”

But poetry doesn’t care if it’s in a parking lot or juvi. It doesn’t seek to capture the universe. Instead it withdraws to its safe place and captures the inside of the turtle’s shell. Inside this shell there’s no thoughts about publishing (I’m such a rookie poet it’s not funny), and certainly not making money (not even the Galapagos Tortoises of poetry can manage to live on verse alone). Inside the turtle’s shell, it’s dark. For prose, I am constantly trying to build a big enough fire to see my way through the darkness. With poetry, I am happy to sit and wait for my eyes to adjust. Slowly pin-pricks will appear. There is, it turns out, a universe within that turtle shell.

That is my overly poetic mixed metaphorical explanation of the number 12,007.

I am not going to abandon Novel B. It’s just a low. These things are cyclic. In five weeks, I’ll be high on words, the muses will communicate by RSS feed, the planets will slow their orbits in awe, and, for the cherry on top, I’ll get something accepted for an online journal I had forgotten I submitted to. But first, I need a good night’s sleep!

Status Report: Week Thirty-Nine

I should start by touching on two points on my last status report. Firstly, my prediction for Week Thirty-Eight (Seven Days of Zero Words) was incorrect. On the nine hour ferry ride from Santorini to Athens I tried to write. Due to the circumstances “writing” meant longhand in a 99 euro-cent notebook I’d bought especially in Fira (I was getting withdrawal). By my count I wrote 1,907 words. Not a very good return for nine hours, but it wasn’t the most conducive environment. And I know it says in my own rules that only words typed into a computer should count towards my tally, but I went through the effort of counting them and I don’t see the difference between my abortive efforts then and my abortive efforts in Microsoft word today… so I’m counting them.

I was tried rewriting the opening pages of Novel A while I was on the ferry. In my last status report it was still up in the air which novel (the imaginatively named A and B) I would throw myself into upon my return. I thought I’d cracked it as I lay in bed my last night in Santorini. I had the voice for the narrator of Novel A, the unique way to open the novel. I planned out the first page in my head, crafting the sentences, reordering them. When I came to put them down on paper on the ferry, I remembered it all, but it wasn’t actually a page, it was half a page. When I tried to fill the rest of the page, it began to unravel. I tried another angle. And another.

Somewhere in the Aegean Sea I decided to jettison Novel A (for now) and finish Novel B. For those of you playing Count The Flip-Flops, this brings the 2008 tally to 298.

Anyway. Novel B is going great. Slow but great. I think my self confidence hit 11 on Tuesday. Everything in the most recent file before I abandoned Novel B last (early May) was well written and I could see where it all fit in. There were gaps where I could start writing straight away, and the voice came right back to me.

On Wednesday I went back and looked at some earlier drafts from Jan-Feb 08, just to check I hadn’t jettisoned a scene or even a phrase that needed resurrecting in the definitive version I was now working on. But these older drafts were awful. I mean, unreadable awful. It was like I had written these drafts five years ago. Like I didn’t care about sentences. Didn’t care about characters. Didn’t get around to having a plot.

I how could I have been so off the mark in February, and so sharp in April? How could I have abandoned the novel in May? Some of the answers are probably embedded in this blog. One day I might read over this and see if I can isolate certain behaviours (reading certain authors, blogging too much or too little, thinking too much about publication) which mess with my quan.

Then again. I’m happy to write off all of my earlier rubbish as ‘Getting Into The Voice’ and just power on with what I hope will still be a happening project a month from now.

Week Thirty-Nine – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 17,700 words
Average: 2,529 words per day (compared to target of 3,001)
Most productive day: Tuesday 23 September, 3,892 words
Least productive day: Saturday 27 September, 882 words
Year-to-date: 617,777 words (125,392 words behind target)

So the deficit is now looking like the population of a Caribbean island. In peak season. It's official. I chose the wrong year to shoot for one million words. Too much travel. Look at this graph:
Only 46 sleeps till Estonia and Latvia!

Status Report: Week Thirty-Seven (and Thirty-Eight, sort of)

We leave for eight days in Greece tomorrow, so I’m doing my status report early this week. Obviously, taking Sunday (on average my most productive day in 2008) and the it’s less productive sibling Saturday out of the mix, my word count is far from impressive.

But even if I wasn’t setting out for the Cyclades, I suspect I would have found many other things to do beside write.

First, there was the move on Thursday after work. Still unpacking boxes and sorting and accustoming ourselves to our new flat. In fact, I still haven’t decided where I’ll be doing my writing. It’s a one bedroom flat, and a compact one at that, with no desk to speak of. At the moment I’m typing this on the half dining room table, despite the fact there is no dining room, just a patch of carpet between the couch and kitchen. Once I’ve sorted my posi out, I’ll post some photos so you all can compare and contrast with the old set up.

Second, the monkey is off my back. My short story collection is in the post.

Funny thing is, I suddenly have four or five new stories I want to write. And a new idea for a novel. I no longer suspect it, I believe: The Muses can be tricked. Next time I’m at a loss for something to write, I’ll open every ‘work in progress’ file on my computer with the intention of finishing some of them (ha!) and wham, new ideas.

Hopefully the Muses aren’t reading this…

Who’s for some numbers?

Week Thirty-Seven – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 10,031 words (compared to 15,934words last week)
Average: 1,433 words per day based on a 7 day week;2,006 words per day based on a 5 day week
Most productive day: Wednesday 10 September, 3,372 words
Least productive day: Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 September, zero words
Year-to-date: 597,470 words (107,448 words behind target)

And while I’m at it, here’s what Week Thirty-Eight will look like:

Weekly Wordcount: 0 words (compared to 10,031 words last week)
Average: 0 words per day
Most productive day: N/A
Least productive day: Mon-Sun
Year-to-date: 597,470 words (126,574 words behind target)

I was in a good mood when I started this post.

I’m sure I’ll be in a good mood when I start my next post.

Yassas!

Status Report: Week Thirty-Six

Week Thirty-Six – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 15,934 words (compared to 22,753 words last week)
Average: 2,276 words per day (compared to target of 3,001/day)
Most productive day: Tuesday 2 September, 3,072 words
Least productive day: Thursday 4 September, 1,089 words
Year-to-date: 587,439 words (98,353 words behind target)

Not as bounteous a week as last week. It's hard to write much when you're main task is proof reading. I discovered one story, 'Mark II', which I worked on solidly last week, was still not good enough. It's place in the collection has been taken by a much older story (it was part of my writing sample when I applied for the MA programme back in Nov 2005, though it has changed titles three times since then).

In the process of cleaning up my desk in preparation for our move on Tuesday I found a print out of an earlier version of 'Mark II', back when it was called something else (problem titles usually associate with problem stories). Written at the top of the print out was the following: "Consign to the dustbin of shit stories". I could have saved myself a few hours last week if I'd taken this advice, but I hate to see all that work go down the drain.

[Despite having a commerce degree and several years of work experience in the financial sector, I still can't transfer the whole sunk cost thing into real life, and especially not writing].

This coming week will be carnage. The move on Tuesday, re-packing for Greece, final edits on stories then posting off a doorstop of double-spaced A4 to a semi-unsuspecting publishing house.

The project on return from Greece will be... *drumroll*

Um...

The last couple of weeks of action / progress / positivity have convinced me I need to work towards one single, achievable goal at a time. I will be able to write in a room without a television, and will have a relatively settled three months before we pick up sticks and resume our roles as full-time vagabonds, so I am keen to finish a novel by early December.

I feel this is achievable with Novel A or Novel B. This might sound cocky, or unrealistic, or off-hand, but a quick look at my all-knowing spreadsheet tells me I have devoted 24,763 words to Novel A so far in 2008 (in addition to writing a 80,000 word version in 2006) and 61,828 words on Novel B.

I would like to finish both, eventually. But I must choose one.

Until last week, Novel A was the obvious candidate. If I were a betting man, I'd still say it was 9/14 that this will be my project.

But I re-read some of Novel B the other day and, well, it's not too shabby.

Here's hoping it’s good decision-making weather in the Cyclades!

Status Report: Week Thirty-Five

Week Thirty-Five – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 22,753 words (compared to 18,199 words last week)
Average: 3,250 words per day (compared to target of 3,001/day)
Most productive day: Wednesday 27 August, 4,771 words
Least productive day: Friday 29 August, 1,054 words
Year-to-date: 571,505 words (95,162 words behind target)

Don’t tear up your tickets just yet. Week thirty five’s average output of 3,250 words per day was the highest since, wait for it, Week One. And that was only a six day week as 2008 began on a Tuesday. And back in 2008 I wasn’t working full-time. Heck, I wasn’t even working part-time.

What was I doing?

Actually, the question I should be asking is what have I been doing since Week One? And how come I can knock out nearly 23,000 words while working full-time this last week?

The answer, my friend, ain’t blowing in the wind. It’s glaringly obvious. But still. Here it is, the earth-shattering revelation: having a specific goal helps you write more. Patent Pending.

But seriously, you get yourself into something as meaningless and difficult as writing 1,000,000 words in a year, and after six months, you can trot out 2,000 words a day on autopilot. And in a way this is great. Any other year I would have completed season after season as the Dolphins on Madden or watched every season of 24 on DVD, but instead I wrote whatever I could be bothered writing. The net result (from June to mid-August) is only two or three promising stories and a 10-15 (a surprising amount) of poems I’m happy with, which, in the great wash up, is a whole lot better than playing playstation or watching tele… if you want to be taken seriously as a writer.

That wee proviso is actually quite important. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with consuming culture—after all, without consumers of books, where would writers be?*—but I do believe dedication to the craft is important and involves sacrifices.

I sound like a tosser right now, so I’ll change the subject, slightly.

My goal, as mentioned alluded to last week, is to ‘finish’ my short story collection before we go to Greece.

And by jove, I’m almost there. I sound like a tosser right now, so I’ll stop talking like a WWI fighter pilot (Sopwith Camel, of course).

Here are the graphs. Excuse me while I revel in their beauty.

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*answer: facilitating creative writing workshops.**

**This joke may come back to bite me.

Status Report: Week Thirty-Four

Week Thirty-Four – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 18,199 words (compared to 12,978 words last week) (the highest weekly total for over two months)
Average: 2,600 words per day (compared to target of 3,001/day -- so still a ways off)
Most productive day: Monday 18 August, 4,494 words
Least productive day: Wednesday 20 August, 1,156 words
Year-to-date: 548,742 words (98,789 words behind target)

I surprised myself a bit last week. I was consigned to falling over 100,000 words behind target, but an explosion of words early on in the week has delayed that indignity... temporarily

I also wrote August off as a month of doing things rather than writing things, but it seems the two are not (always) mutually exclusive.

As this graph illustrates…

… a lot of last week’s words were devoted to short fiction. That’s because I’ve gone back to the problem short stories which are holding up my collection and cut away paragraphs and pages like they were someone else’s work (sometimes I think of myself two months ago as my enemy -- it helps me be ruthless with his work) and refilled the stories with all the greatness I had to hand at the time. Of course, in two months time, the August me will be the enemy and I will be tempted to cut it all back to the roots again…

It’s like Nam Le said at his session yesterday: Writing a short story collection is like painting a bridge. By the time you get to the end, the side you started from needs another coat.

Anyway. I feel like I’m being productive at the moment. Trying not to think about what the deficit will look like after we move flats and spend a week in Greece in September.

Status Report: Week Thirty-Three

I let my own writing hijack yesterday’s book festival review, so it’s only far I hijack today’s status report with a bit more about the book festival…

Over the weekend I attended two Ten at Ten Sessions. These are free ten minute readings at 10am (hence the title) every day while the festival is on. I missed last Sunday’s because I didn’t know you had to get a ticket for these free readings (to do so you incur a £1 fee, though it is a flat fee so you can get as many free tickets as you want for your pound).

Saturday was Canadian poet Gary Geddes, who read three poems. Two things have stuck with me. The first was his effort to read a set in Orkney in a Scottish accent (he managed okay, expect for a few Canadian ‘oot’s). The second was when he said: “I was at the International Criminal Court at the Hague all last week, so I’ve come from crimes against humanity to Edinburgh, where the only crimes are aesthetic.” At first I thought he was referring to the architecture, which seemed a strange thing to say since Edinburgh is widely considered one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. But then Marisa suggested maybe he meant the people. This makes a bit more sense, but still, not the sort of thing you say to get on side with the locals.

Sunday’s reading was by Sophie Hannah, who’s published a bit of everything (poetry, short stories, children’s and crime fiction). She chose to read the first three pages from her newest, as-yet-unpublished psychological thriller, The Other Half Lives (or something like that). The premise: a man admits to killing someone who isn’t dead. The first three pages just affirmed my opinion that it’s very hard to make prose written for the page work in as an engaging reading. I guess I was just unlucky Hannah chose to wear her crime writer’s hat for those ten minutes. Oh well.

Hijack over. Here's some graphs:

Week Thirty-Three – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 12,978 words (compared to 12,185 words last week)
Average: 1,854 words per day (compared to target of 3,001/day)
Most productive day: Wednesday 13 August, 2,411 words (the lowest ‘best’ day for any non-travelling week this year)
Least productive day: Thursday 14 August, 1,106 words
Year-to-date: 530,553 words (97,862 words behind target)