Does This Newsletter Count as My Thousand Words for the Day?
I am not a fan of wordcounts. It’s probably the only effective way for any writer to meet a deadline, but I don’t like them. Some of it is my own brain with all its quirks. I get all up in my head about wordcounts. I get fixated upon particular numbers, how they add up, the patterns they create; and then that’s all I can think about.
Wordcounts also discourage me. One bad day, as if I only ever have one, and the rest of my week is thrown off, like I’m always trying to make up for that one non-writing day back on Tuesday or the Wednesday I fell a few hundred words short of my goal.
My compromise with wordcounts is that I do word minimums. I need to do 1000 words a day or 500 words a day on a particular piece in order to have time to edit it before I turn it in to the publisher. I try to make that daily minimum per piece as low as possible. The sooner I pass it, the sooner I’m in the flow of writing and not looking at wordcounts anymore. Often, I’ll pass it by quite a lot. The key for me is just starting to get the words down.
But then, I don’t keep track anymore. I don’t write down my total words for the day. I don’t have any idea how many total words I’ve written this week, this month, or this year. The next day I don’t remember how many words I wrote yesterday. After a while, I don’t know which days I didn’t write at all. It’s a new day and a new start and I just write again.
I guess my ultimate goal is to just write, to just create the story. I suppose on some level I’m trying to recapture that raw drive I had at the very beginning of my journey when I was just writing because there was absolutely nothing else in the world I wanted to do. I get very close to that many days because writing is magic to me even when it’s not going well.
Here are some things you might be interested in:
The Books of Horror Facebook Group: Readers Take Over
by Jay Wilburn via LitReactor
… I joined. And when I did, I discovered something unusual. Unlike most Facebook groups, this one was full of readers, not just authors self-promoting to each other. These readers were excited about books and they were buying tons of them …
Author’s Note: This is a story I wrote for my wife one Valentines Day. It's cheaper than a card and means more.
“Yarn Over”
by Jay Wilburn
There was nothing wrong with her home, nothing on the surface. Over time, it just wasn’t the place her, not anymore …
For a dollar, you get all kinds of great stuff from Patreon.com/JayWilburn
Thanks, Everybody
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