In Today’s Journal
* The TNDJ Challenges Report
* To the Important Stuff
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
The TNDJ Challenges Report
The whole point of these challenges is to have fun and grow as a writer.
There is no cost. Feel free to jump in at any time.
Participating in any challenge is a way to drive yourself to the computer or legal pad and write fiction. It’s also a great way to build and maintain a streak.
As if writing more and better fiction isn’t enough, I even offer prizes. To see those, please visit The NEW TNDJ Challenges.
Bradbury Challenge
The only requirement is to write at least one short story, short-short story, or essay per week.
During the past week, the following writers wrote these new stories:
- Erin Donoho “Oklahoma Fields” 2300 Crime Thriller
- Vanessa V. Kilmer “Time Out” 3124 Apocalyptic
- Christopher Ridge “Sticky Sweet” 8032 Noir/Thriller
- KC Riggs “La Palomita” 1177 General Fiction
- Dave Taylor “Saturday Night at Victor’s 2570 Horror
- Dave Taylor “His New Glasses” 2719 Paranormal
- Mattie Fern Worrix “Dog Is God Spelled Backwards” 3180 Romantic Comedy
The Stephen King Challenge
The requirement is to maintain an average of at least 1000 words per day as you proceed through writing a novel or novella.
- Jacob Hawes “Crystal God 2” 8186 Fantasy To date 28342
The Run With Harvey Challenge
The requirement is to maintain an average of at least 2000 words per day. The words can go into any short or long fiction or both.
- Christopher Ridge 15082 words this week.
Congratulations to all of these writers.
To the Important Stuff
I was poking around this morning over at HarveyStanbrough.com with a search for “challenge” when I came across this post from March 1, 2015. I’d started as a professional writer only four months earlier. It’s good that some things, the good things, never change:
A writer is a person who writes, who puts new words on the page. It’s a person who loves to tell stories in written communication. There’s nothing elevated about it, nothing special except that you get to spend your life making up stuff for a living. If that definition fits you, or if you want that definition to fit you, here are a few guidelines that might help.
- Your conscious critical mind exists to protect you. Like the benevolent android in Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands,” it’s sole function is to keep you from being harmed… even by rejection. That’s why it’s so much easier to spend all your time rewriting and polishing instead of moving forward and writing the next story. There’s no risk of rejection as long as you’re rewriting.
- Your subconscious creative mind is the source of all your inspiration, all your story ideas, and all your stories. If you get out of your own way and trust your subconscious, you will write in your own original voice. Then your only challenge is to NOT go back and rewrite and polish until you’ve erased your voice and made your story sound like everything else in the slush pile.
- Everything in life is a matter of priorities. My critical mind often will use that to attempt to “save me” from writing. When I’m about to write, suddenly doing something else (anything else) becomes a priority. And I shake my index finger at my critical mind. No! BAD critical mind! Get back in your corner and leave me alone! My creative mind has stories to write! I wanna run and play with my fictional friends now. You get the idea.
- Productivity is what I’m all about as a writer. The more work I put out there, the more I practice my writing, the better it becomes and the more books and stories I have to feed off of each other and the more income I receive from my writing. Period. This is the same reason every time I get five new stories I slap them into a collection in both ebook and paper. When I get ten, I put them into another collection. That gives me three streams of passive revenue from every story I write. Can you say Ka-ching?
- Productivity can be reduced to mathematics, and math is a concrete, finite thing. Here’s the equation: P = PW/h(H). Or Productivity equals Publishable Words you can write per Hour times the number of Hours you spend in the chair putting new words on the page. If you want to increase your productivity, you have to increase one of those two factors: either your words per hour or the number of hours you spend in the chair.
- Words per hour… Truly, this is a biggie. I write about 1000 publishable words per hour. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But if you’re writing 1000 words per hour, that’s only 17 words per minute. If you’re writing fewer than 700 or 800 words per hour, you might want to check in with yourself and figure out what you’re doing during that hour. You can safely bet it’s linked to your critical mind.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
How Literary Minimalism Can Help Your Writing Andrew Schrater reminds me of me nine or ten years ago. (grin) Probably worth your time to subscribe.
3 Tips for Writers with Chronic Illness or Caregiving Duties Not vetted. If you need this, I hope it helps.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 870
Writing of Blackwell Ops 48: Razor Sharpe
Day 1…… 2213 words. To date…… 2213
Day 2…… 1210 words. To date…… 3423
Day 3…… 1318 words. To date…… 4741
Day 4…… 2481 words. To date…… 7222
Day 5…… 1588 words. To date…… 8810
Day 6…… 2215 words. To date…… 11025
Fiction for September……………… 40266
Fiction for 2025…………………….. 574415
Nonfiction for September.………… 23150
Nonfiction for 2025………………… 209400
2025 consumable words………….. 776201
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 14
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 32
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 118
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 302
Short story collections……………………. 29