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.<\/p>\n
Okay, I can’t leave it at that, it sounds so suspicious. My 58keys YouTube<\/a> channel now has a Patreon thing<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Also obviously very discouraged when another week goes by and I haven’t got any further with this script or with that novel.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Yet it’s this unpublished sliver that I think about.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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You and I can always write more. And that is always the answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m doing this thing at the moment where I actually count the number of words I write each week. I … Continue reading