The Journal, Saturday, 8/29

The Day
Rolled out a little late at quarter to 3.

Wow. I hope all of you who are reading this are having a lot better month with your writing than I am so far. With the month mostly gone, it isn’t likely to improve much either.

No walk today. Not a lot else either, except I switched my internet browser from Firefox over to Opera. I’m more than happy with it. For one thing, whenever Adobe Flash would kick in to run any video (weather, etc.) it ate tons of memory. My computer sounded like a military fighter jet warming up to take off, and it slowed to a crawl. It was so bad that sometimes I used the Alt/Ctrl Delete trick to bring up the Task Manager and shut down the Adobe Flash process.

Now it doesn’t do that because Flash works differently with Opera. Cool.

I’ve been slipping badly on meeting my daily goal of 3,000 words per day. Probably I will adjust that one beginning in September.

But I still have a good weekly goal of one new short story per week. This coming Monday, I’m posting a story I reworked, but that doesn’t excuse me from the goal of writing a new one this week (before Monday). So probably I’ll do that today. Or tomorrow. (grin)

One good thing about writing short stories is that they’re usually finished in one day. Another good thing is that they can lead to a novella or novel. They’re also great fun because I can give a character a problem and drop him or her into a setting and I’m off and running. Then I just write the opening (300 to 500 words). If the opening works, I keep writing. If it doesn’t, I chuck it and start over or start something new.

But it’s pure writing into the dark, just like writing a one-off stand-alone novel. I don’t have to worry about timelines or about various characters cropping up from the past and so on.

Anyway, I don’t want to allow myself to fail on this short story per week challenge. I want to hold out for as long as I can. The last time I did this, I had a streak that ran for 66 straight weeks (I think that’s the right number) and included 70 short stories. I want to try to beat that this time.

But the thing about writing goals is this: If you fail to hit a goal, so what. Nobody dies, the electric company doesn’t turn off the power, and the goal resets. In other words, you have absolutely nothing to lose and the world to gain.

Topic of the Night: Rehashing Stuff

I was going to write about “The Value of Streaks,” but when I was looking back for info, I realize I talked about setting goals just back in July, from around the 6th or 7th up through about the 10th. In fact, I wrote about setting goals, recurring goals, and the power of streaks. If you’re interested, click The Journal tab on the website and scroll back.

And my apologies for repeating myself on this stuff so often. I didn’t realize. When I don’t have something to talk about, I’ll avoid doing a Topic.

Okay, so I’m off this now and working on my own stuff the rest of the day.

Well, as it turns out, that was two hours ago. I remembered I needed to at least rinse off my pickup (tossed cold coffee out the window and it streaked the door), and I ended up washing both the car and the pickup.

Everybody needs a hobby. I guess mine is being stupid in the heat when I could be inside, writing in the (relative) cool. (grin)

So after I cool down a bit and get a shower, I’ll write for awhile.

Today’s Writing

Got a little done on Wes’ story. And it was fun because it completely surprised me. And I’m still feeling lazy, so I guess I’ll write the short story tomorrow.

Fiction Words: 1084

Writing of Book 9 of the Wes Crowley saga
Day 1…… 3213 words. Total words to date….. 3213 words
Day 2…… 1046 words. Total words to date….. 4259 words
Day 3…… 1858 words. Total words to date….. 6117 words
Day 4…… 1023 words. Total words to date….. 7140 words
Day 5…… 1587 words. Total words to date….. 8327 words
Day 6…… X943 words. Total words to date….. 9270 words
Day 7…… 1084 words. Total words to date….. 10354 words

Total fiction words for the month…………… 21585
Total fiction words for the year……………… 463985