In today’s Journal
* Welcome
* A New Story
* December 2
* Isaac Asimov
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Welcome
Welcome to Alexander S and any other new subscribers or readers of the Journal. I hope you will find it useful.
Get the Archives and other free downloads at the Journal website. Just click the links and a PDF will download in a new page.
I also recommend reading “I Believe in You”.
Oh, and check out this half-hour video where bestselling author Vin Zandri and I are chatting about writing at The Writer’s Life.
A New Story
“Needful Things” published yesterday on my Stanbrough Writes Substack.
To subscribe, click the link above and then the Subscribe button at the end of the story. You’ll receive a new short story every Friday, and it’s free.
Below the Subscribe button, there are other short stories you can read in most genres. Enjoy!
December 2
I posted something similar yesterday under the title “December 1.” Not to nag or anything, but I thought this bears repeating.
Goals are important. They drive you to (or back to) the computer and they make your fingers move. Like music makes you tap your feet under the table. That said, of course, they’re completely up to you.
If you didn’t start yesterday, today is a great time to begin thinking about your writing goals for the next year. Whatever goals you set, I encourage you to
One writer I know recently set a daily word count goal of 1500 words per day.
Nothing huge, right? Nothing daunting? And if I remember correctly, Stephen King’s daily goal is about the same. And if you do miss, the beauty of a daily goal is that it resets every day.
If my writer friend keeps that average going, that goal will net him 10,500 words per week; 45,000 words per average 30-day month; and a whopping 549,000 words for the year of 2024.
Of course, you can also set goals in the other direction. You can set an annual goal first, then break them into smaller, more manageable increments.
If your goal for the year is to write 1,000,000 publishable words of fiction, that will feel impossible.
But it will feel a little less impossible to write 83,334 words per month. Or 19,231 words per week. And it will feel much less impossible to write 2733 words per day.
Or if your goal is to write 500,000 publishable words of fiction, those numbers fall to 41,667 per month, 9616 words per week, and 1367 words per day.
As I mentioned yesterday, I know one “professional” writer who laboriously churns out TWO 50,000 to 60,000 word novels per year. She is considered by some to be prolific.
If you do the math, you’ll find that at the top end of her production, she averages only 10,000 words per month (500 words fewer than my friend above writes in a week). That’s 2308 words per week and a paltry 328 words per day.
Divide that by the 16 hours most of us are typically awake during the day and you’ll find it’s a blazing-fast 21 words PER HOUR or one-third of one word per minute.
Frankly, I don’t know how anyone can write that slowly unless they’re writing a grocery list and checking the fridge and pantry as they go.
Isaac Asimov
Dan Baldwin pointed me in the direction of Isaac Asimov’s final collection of short stories and a novella: Gold.
According to Dan, “About 60 percent of the book is Assimov writing on writing science fiction.”
There you go. The opportunity to learn from a master. I ordered a trade paperback copy immediately from Amazon for only $11.42 including tax.
Just thought I’d pass it along. Again. (grin)
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Star Trek Stuff A blast from Dean’s past (Brought forward from 2012)
Planning, Prepping and Productivity Tips for Self-published Authors
We’re All in This Together, Anecdotes from the Front Lines
Ready to publish your audiobooks with Kobo Writing Life? Read this Not for me, but if audio is for you, check it out.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 650
Writing of Blackwell Ops 14: Charlie Task
Day 1…… 1359 words. To date…… 1359
Day 2…… 3002 words. To date…… 4361
Day 3…… 3349 words. To date…… 7710
Day 4…… 1687 words. To date…… 9397
Day 5…… 2271 words. To date…… 11668
Day 6…… 3095 words. To date…… 14763
Day 7…… 3924 words. To date…… 18687
Day 8…… 3278 words. To date…… 21965
Day 9…… 4093 words. To date…… 26058
Day 10…. 3764 words. To date…… 29822
Day 11…. 4362 words. To date…… 34184
Fiction for December…………………… 4362
Fiction for 2023…………………………. 400834
Fiction since August 1………………… 290651
Nonfiction for December……………… 1770
Nonfiction for the year……………… 257350
Annual consumable words………… 659039
2023 Novels to Date……………………… 8
2023 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2023 Short Stories to Date……………… 7
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 79
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)…… 235
Short story collections…………………… 31
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Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.