In today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* The Journey Home: Part 6
* A Second (Very Short) Addendum
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“Most cynics are really crushed romantics: they’ve been hurt, they’re sensitive, and their cynicism is a shell that’s protecting this tiny, dear part in them that’s still alive.” Jeff Bridges
“No one expects a medical student to perform surgery correctly on his first try. And no corporate lawyer would be allowed to negotiate a merger without experience and years of law school behind her. Lawyers and doctors learn by doing. Writers feel we should already know.” Sarah LaBrie
“I think we do ourselves a serious disservice by not talking more openly about what failing at writing feels like. By this, I mean the physical feeling of writing badly: the instinct that tells you when a prepositional phrase is wrenching your sentence in the wrong direction; the sense that comes upon a writer all at once that her entire career has beached itself upon a handful of paragraphs she just can’t order correctly; the feeling that settles upon her, even as she hits ‘send’ on a manuscript, that she just hasn’t gotten it right, and that perhaps she never will.” Sarah LaBrie
And this! Let this sink in! “I strained for months and years over pieces that would never see publication, while all my best stories tended to be completed in a matter of hours or in an afternoon.” Sarah LaBrie
The Journey Home: Part 6 ended yesterday at 54,490 words. I cycled through the very short last writing session, cut a few hundred words of excess, then ran the spell check and sent it off to my excellent first readers. My average over the 14 writing days was 3892 words per day. The average over the 17 calendar days was 3205 words per day.
Today I will read a short novel for DWS’ Shared Worlds Class, then watch a video and consider whether I want to write a short story for one of his anthologies. If I decide to do that, I will do so on Monday. Then more than likely I’ll start my next novel on Tuesday.
That’s my schedule as it stands at this moment. I might be away for a day or two, or I might blog about the novel-reading, anthology-short-story-writing process if I can think of anything that I believe might be useful to you.
A Second (Very Short) Addendum
If you haven’t already, first read “An Addendum” in yesterday’s post.
And if you believe you’re in the “not ready yet” for writing into the dark, check in with yourself.
That thought might be just one more trick of your critical, conscious mind. Its job is to protect you, in this case from failure. If you don’t try, the reasoning goes, you can’t fail.
Then again, as Bradbury famously said, “You fail only if you stop writing.” Or, put another way, if you want to write and you don’t, you’ve already failed.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
See “Movie Gems from the Early 1930s” at https://killzoneblog.com/2021/02/movie-gems-from-the-early-1930s.html.
See “Demystifying the Writer’s Fear of Failure” at https://lithub.com/demystifying-the-writers-fear-of-failure/. Good essay with more gems than I listed in Quotes of the Day above. I do not ascribe to the notion that writing is “hard,” though, in any way, shape or form. But then, I’ve dug ditches and repaired barbed-wire fences.
See “How Fear of Failure Keeps Writers From Producing Their Best Work” at https://thewritelife.com/fear-of-failure/.
See “Search Dogs, Search Warrants, a Search for Words, and Lies” at https://leelofland.com/search-dogs-search-warrants-a-search-for-words-and-lies-2/. (Offering an online seminar.)
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………………… 560 words
Writing of The Journey Home: Part 6 (novel)
Day 1…… 1628 words. Total words to date…… 1628
Day 2…… 2011 words. Total words to date…… 3639
Day 3…… 4722 words. Total words to date…… 8361
Day 4…… 3766 words. Total words to date…… 12127
Day 5…… 5161 words. Total words to date…… 17288
Day 6…… 6572 words. Total words to date…… 23860
Day 7…… 4680 words. Total words to date…… 28540
Day 8…… 5834 words. Total words to date…… 34374
Day 9…… 3157 words. Total words to date…… 37531
Day 10… 3615 words. Total words to date…… 41146
Day 11… 3621 words. Total words to date…… 44767
Day 12… 4018 words. Total words to date…… 48785
Day 13… 4112 words. Total words to date…… 52897
Day 14… 1593 words. Total words to date…… 54490 (done)
Total fiction words for February……… 20116
Total fiction words for the year………… 117893
Total nonfiction words for February… 6090
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 31420
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 149013
Calendar Year 2021 Novels to Date…………………… 2
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… X
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 1
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 56
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 215
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31