I’m doing this thing at the moment where I actually count the number of words I write each week. I promise that it’s for a good reason, it’s for a good purpose.

Okay, I can’t leave it at that, it sounds so suspicious. My 58keys YouTube channel now has a Patreon thing and one element of that is a weekly email to subscribers called “Fess Up and Press On Friday”. The stated aim is that I will tell you what I have written and — more importantly — what I haven’t written this week, plus what I promise to write in the next seven days.

I say that, then Patreon subscribers can — and I love this, do — attest to what they’ve done, not done, and are going to do. I think it keeps us going, I know that so far I am quite encouraged when I come to look at what I’ve done.

Also obviously very discouraged when another week goes by and I haven’t got any further with this script or with that novel.

But on average so far, I’ve been writing around 17,000 words per week, with practically all of them published. That’s going to go down shortly, I can see this is a busy period, but given that I don’t know how much you write, I can tell myself that this is a good amount and so feel, well, good.

I want to also say that I have automated a lot of this, although in another way I ant to not say that to your face at all. It’s Occam’s razor: am I anal for counting every word or anoraksic for having my Mac do most of the counting? Let me get back to the point.

Which is that I said most of that word count is published. The small bit that isn’t, or at least isn’t yet, is the killer.

If the current level kept up to the end of this year, I would have written and published something around 800,000 words and since I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’m certainly a few million published words in.

Yet it’s this unpublished sliver that I think about. There’s this certain type of writing I want to get into and maybe this is on my mind today because I’ve just an extremely praising rejection to do with it, but it is all feeling impenetrable.

I know I’m wrong, I know that this is just like any other form of publishing or producing, writers are needed and unless this rejection was entirely bollocks, I am capable of doing it.

But it does feel sometimes like all I can do is count words. Mind you, I’m not sure there is ever anything else. All writing is one word after another.

And so if I’m not getting where I want to be, if I am not achieving what I want, the answer is that it’s entirely on me and I should pull my finger out. So just as in Fess Up, I’ll make a vow to you: I will write more of this thing I want to do.

You and I can always write more. And that is always the answer.