It's been almost two years since I posted on this blog, and the other blog I did for the year after that has vanished. Maybe I'll be able to find and recover the content, but I didn't want to spend any time on that this morning. It was more important to get back to putting the words down.
So what happened in those twenty-three months of inactivity? Well, I had a really productive year as a writer, and then I had a year of not writing a word.
During the writing year, which spanned April 2021 through April 2022, I wrote a lot. I completed more than fifty short stories and three short novels. I also blogged pretty regularly on the other blog, which was part of my now defunct website. All told, I wrote about 350,000 words, which is around 1000 words a day on average.
But that's not how the words came out.
They came out in abrupt spurts, mostly on weekends and vacations. There were several Sundays where I wrote in excess of 10,000 words, and one weekend when I wrote more than 20,000 words on both Saturday AND Sunday, almost 45,000 words in one weekend.
Productive for sure, but I never established a real writing routine, unless frantic panic-writing is what you want out of your writing routine.
I did that largely because I put my money where my mouth was and signed up for three challenges with prolific writer and mentor to many, Dean Wesley Smith. The challenges were to write a short story every week, a novel every two months, and to publish a major book every month, all for a whole year.
I got through the short story challenge, halfway through the novel challenge, and nine months into the publishing challenge, Then, the wheels came off and I stopped writing dead in my tracks.
The first reason has already been stated. A routine is necessary, and you can only panic-write for so long until something goes wrong. I don't remember exactly what derailed me, but somewhere around the end of April 2022, I didn't leave myself enough time to get all the writing and publishing done, and instead got none of it done. It was like I'd run into a wall.
Second reason is I decided to take a promotion at work because we needed the money. I'd stepped back from the job six months before the writing streak and challenges started because I wanted to have the time and energy to focus on writing, and that plan worked. Right up until it didn't.
I didn't set our finances up for success, and made the mistake of thinking I could force them into shape through a combination of extreme discipline, gig work, and luck.
Yeah, no.
So I took the promotion, and within three weeks I was completely swamped and focused on the job, and when I did have time to myself, I didn't want to spend it wrestling with the writing. I was exhausted, planning (and paying for!) a wedding on top of everything else, and my desire to write had been relegated to the back burner by poor choices and necessity.
That's lasted until the past couple of weeks. I've tried to restart a few times in the past several months, but other things kept popping up and taking priority. My wife hurt herself badly on out honeymoon, and has just now returned to work six months later. I took a transfer-promotion at work that was another mild upheaval, though it did put me significantly closer to home, and any time I tried to interrupt myself and establish a fresh routine that included writing, I found myself failing at launch.
So here I am, a year removed from any kind of creative writing, and I'm restarting today. The wife is back to work and feeling a lot better. The finances have been wrestled into order and a modicum of discipline and routine have been established. I'm still in the new job, but I've got in under control and mostly contained within the confines of a 50 hour work week. My friends are all too busy to make any kind of regular plans, and we've fallen off everyone's radar anyway, what with the injury and all.
And Dean Wesley Smith has started the Dean Challenge.
Dean's been away from the writing a few months himself due to some eye issues, so he's getting himself going again now that he's healthy by offering this challenge: from April 1 through the end of the year, he wants to write at Pulp Speed One, as he calls it, which means one million consumable words a year. Anyone who wants to can try to beat his word count, and if you succeed, you get a lifetime subscription to one of five different teaching programs for writers that he and his wife, Kristine Katherine Rusch, teach on Teachable.
They are both great writers, but also fantastic teachers. In fact, Kris's Freelancer's Survival Guide series is one of the most important resources around for writers trying to understand how now to make all the mistakes I did last year. Especially the financial and time-management mistakes!
So I've jumped into the challenge. I mean, I wrote almost 400,000 words in a year once. How hard can it be to beat a professional writer with like 300 novels and more than a thousand short stories under his belt?
Hey, at least blogging counts. So expect to see one of these every day. And if you don't, hit me up and ask me where today's blog is, okay?
I'm going to need all the help I can get.
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