Reworking My Routine, and Big Brother

In today’s Journal

* Reworking My Routine and Schedule
* Big Brother Might Be Closer Than You Believe
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Reworking My Routine and Schedule

I’m using the final few days of June to focus on reworking my routine and schedule. I’ve come up with a new challenge for myself: to get back to my production levels of January 1 through July 31 2021, during which time I wrote 13 novels, a novella, and two short stories, comprising 534,744 words of published fiction.

Don’t let the big number deceive you. That time span is 212 days, so I averaged only 2522 words of published fiction per day, meaning I averaged about 2.5 hours per day writing fiction. Yet I wrote well over half a million words of published fiction in that seven months. Again, in only two and a half hours (average) per day.

Maybe you have as much “free time” to write as I have and maybe you don’t, but unless you’re looking for an excuse for a lack of production, that isn’t the point. The point, dear friends, is that if I can write 1000 words per hour (a blazing slow 17 words per minute) so can you.

Yes, I can touch-type, having learned in high school. But Dean Wesley Smith hits 1000 words per hour average too, using only two fingers. And his annual production of “consumable words” (so fiction and nonfiction, including his blog) is routinely around 1,300,000 words.

(Sigh. Okay, so by that standard, I have to look again at my numbers. From January 1 through July 31 2021 I also wrote 146,430 words of nonfiction in this Journal. So that raises my total number of “consumable words” for that seven-month period to 681,174 for a daily average of  3213 words. But I don’t really care about that. Fiction is what interests me.)

However you choose to count your words, count them. The totals will build rapidly and you will be surprised at how much you’re getting done. The one thing you can’t afford to do is give in to an application failure: you have to apply your backside to a chair. Then simply put your fingers on the keyboard and write whatever comes.

Trust it. Trust yourself and your characters and Just Write, and you’ll be fine.

My daily word count goal during this reset (as it was when I started 9 years ago) will be 3000 publishable words of fiction per day.

Setting a realistic daily word count goal remains the best possible advice I can give you, and doing so myself is the only hope that my reset will work. Barring an actual real-life emergency, my reset will begin officially on July 1.

Notice that I don’t care either way where my 3000 words of publishable fiction per day go. Some will go into a novel or novella, some into a short story. Doesn’t matter. As I’ve said many times before, what matters is THAT I write, not what I write.

Big Brother Might Be Closer Than You Believe

In yesterday’s edition of the Journal, as the first item in “Of Interest,” I posted this:

“See ‘Military-grade AI being used to spy on American civilians’ at https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/military-grade-ai-may-now-be-spying-on-american-civilians. One of those things that will be nothing until suddenly it’s something.”

Interesting Engineering’s Blueprint newsletter also ran a poll, asking Americans whether they were concerned. The results might easily give you some story ideas:

Only 47% said such spying “should be illegal,” 9% said it “makes me nervous,” and another 9% wasted their response with a silly “I’m spying on them.” Pfft. Whatever.

Interesting Engineering gave respondents a limited choice of answers. I have no idea why they would include that last one or even what it means.

But fully 35% of respondents were actually all right with being spied on or with companies spying on others, boasting “I have nothing to hide.”

Of course, whether you have anything to hide is not the point, is it?

Because if you’re certain the point is that you have nothing to hide, I know of people who would be more than happy to spy on you at work. Oh, and during your commute. And for that matter, at home and in your bedroom.

Talk with you later.

Of Interest

See “Experiment with AI…” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/experiment-with-ai-to-understand-it-marketers-and-publicists-encouraged/.

See “Where to Start with Audiobook Publishing” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/where-to-start-with-audiobook-publishing/.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………………… 700

Writing of Rose Padilla (WCG10SF5)

Day 1…… 4283 words. Total words to date…… 4283
Day 2…… 3963 words. Total words to date…… 8246
Day 3…… 1463 words. Total words to date…… 9709
Day 4…… 2445 words. Total words to date……12154

Total fiction words for June……… 12154
Total fiction words for 2023………… 110022
Total nonfiction words for June… 19820
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 129240
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 239262

Calendar Year 2023 Novels to Date…………………… 2
Calendar Year 2023 Novellas to Date……………… 0
Calendar Year 2023 Short Stories to Date………… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 73
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……………………… 221
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31

Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark, adherence to Heinlein’s Rules, and that following the myths of fiction writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.