Hey Folks,
I was going to talk about Dean’s age-based challenge frenzy, but you can see it for yourself in “Of Interest” and draw your own conclusions.
I’ll turn 65 in a few weeks. I tried to set up an interesting goal that has something to do with the numeric designation of my age, but I kept coming back to “Why?”
I mean, if setting such a goal increased my actual productivity and made writing fun again, that could be something.
The closest real challenge I could come up with was to write 52 short stories (one per week) during the year. Add 13 novels to that and I would have 65 publications.
But that goal has serious flaws. For example, I could as easily fulfill the “65” requirement by writing 13 additional short stories.
Okay, so the most salable length for short fiction according to most sources is 3,000 words. If I wrote 65 3,000-word stories, that would still be only 195,000 words (that’s 535 words per day). No real challenge there, eh?
But what if I wrote only the 52 short stories and then compiled 5 10-story collections and 10 5-story collections? That would bring my number of publications for the year to 67.
I could even toss in an omnibus collection of all 52 stories and make it 68.
But including the collections would feel a little like cheating just to beef up my numbers.
Besides, I’m not into writing short stories right now. The only reason to write all of those would be to reach that arbitrary number, and that just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe because in my story-a-week streak, I reached 72 stories before I broke it.
Now 65 novels in a year, that would be really something.
***
I rolled out late, a little before 4, did a lot of online reading, then wrote a lot of this.
After my wife went to work I started setting up the camping trailer as a writing office. The Internet out there is iffy at best, but I’ll carry a flash drive with me back and forth just in case.
(When the Internet’s working, I just save things to my Dropbox and they’re uploaded on my office computer by the time I get inside.)
Anyway, not surprisingly I ran into some problems, so that will be the rest of the day. When I was writing at a kitchen table out there, the Internet was fine. When I moved my little writing stand in there—it’s two inches lowerat 27″—the Internet became iffy.
Back tomorrow.
Of Interest
From The Digital Reader, see “From eBooks to cBooks…” at http://www.talkingnewmedia.com/2017/10/20/ebooks-cbooks-new-ebook-format-combining-best-book-film-exciting-new-story-platform/. Reminiscent, in an odd way, of silent films back when “movies” first started.
Also from The Digital Reader, see “199+ Plot, Name, Story, and Other Generators” at https://the-digital-reader.com/2017/10/22/199-plot-name-story-generators/.
From DWS, see “My Two New Challenges” at https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/my-two-new-challenges/. Personally, I’m more interested in following the 30 stories in 30 days November challenge.
Fiction Words: XXXX
Nonfiction Words: 500 (Journal)
So total words for the day: 500
Writing of Pulp Novel 5 (a Stern Richards novel)
Day 1…… 1080 words. Total words to date…… 1080
Day 2…… 2167 words. Total words to date…… 3247
Day 3…… 1370 words. Total words to date…… 4617
Day 4…… 1840 words. Total words to date…… 6457
Day 5…… 1193 words. Total words to date…… 7650
Day 6…… 1407 words. Total words to date…… 9057
Day 7…… 1180 words. Total words to date…… 10237
Day 8…… XXXX words. Total words to date…… XXXXX
Total fiction words for the month……… 12462
Total fiction words for the year………… 446608
Total nonfiction words for the month… 11770
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 164453
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 611061
The Daily Journal blog streak……………………………………… 693 days
Calendar Year 2017 Novels to Date………………………… 9
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)………………………………………… 27
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)……………………………………… 4
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……………………………… 182