I’ll start with a confession: I don’t feel like writing a blog post today. I really want to work on my novel, but I haven’t done my second blog post for this week, and I know I need to maintain the habit. Usually, I try to bank these early in the week and schedule them for Tuesday and Thursday. Since I’ve been nose-down on The Temporary Hero, I didn’t get it done this week. Since Friday posts don’t seem to get a lot of traction, I’ve basically got to get this one done either today (I’m writing this on Wednesday) or tomorrow, so here I am. Technically, I could put this off another day, but then I’ll be under the gun and this thing will turn out worse than it’s looking now. Plus, IOS is updating my iPad, so I can’t do any work on that, anyway, leaving me sitting in the Writin’ Shack with my Chromebook where Scrivener is unavailable.
Man, the things you gotta put up with, amirite?
So, scrambling around for topics, I spent some time on Reddit, a font of inspiration on most days, and came up empty. Oh, there are plenty of things to write about there, but most of it feels more political than I like. I threw a Hail Mary pass to Twitter, and while I found something to do a quick comedy retweet, that’s all I got. Ugh. Guess I’ll have to come up with something on my own.
One of the habits I’ve cultivated is, when I get an idea for a blog post, I toss it into WordPress as a draft. It takes seconds, and it’s there when I need it, safe from my impressive ability to forget about it. That’s where I found this topic. So, I thought, let’s explore it for a bit. And look, I’ve already written 300 words!
I guess it’s working.
In Lee Childs’ intro to The Deep Blue Good-by, I learned that when John D. MacDonald got back from the war and embarked on his career as a novelist, he wrote 800,000 words in his first four months.
I had to take a second and let that sink in. Assuming an eight-hour workday with weekends off, and I’m sure he worked much harder than that, that’s 5000 words a day. Holy cow! On a good day, I hit 3000. I think my best production was 3500, and that was when it was raining and my family was out of town so I had no distractions.
Clearly, I have to up my game.
So, here’s the point. If your job is flipping burgers, you have to do it, whether you feel like it or not, right? I mean, that’s your job. Well, this is mine. Even when I don’t feel like it, and there are plenty of days when the creative juices aren’t flowing, I still need to plant my butt in front of the keyboard and crank out words.
And, thanks to my having banked this idea a few months back, I’ve just done my first 500 for today.