So, bottom line: yes, at around 12:30 this afternoon I bounded across the 3,000-word mark in the 2010 Write Your A** Off Write-a-Thon.
I’d gotten up around 6:30am, heated water in the teakettle, sat down at my desk and by 7:30 — after incidental stuff like selecting the day’s background music — begun to write. Took a break of about ten minutes at around 9:00 or so (cup of tea #2), and another (#3) around 10:30. Did a word-count check at 12:30, and found that I’d indeed written just over the 3K target. Afterwards I tidied things up a bit, including bringing the current passage to a conclusion.
And then finally opened up the old blogging dashboard.
Because my morning writing time is pretty much the same length every weekday (90 minutes to two hours), there’s usually — usually — a fairly consistent word count each day, depending on how much revision I do. So I don’t really like to rely on word count as a measure of “success.” For one thing, good or ill, I tend to write very fast — not “write” meaning “…in a publishable sense,” obviously. But the words do pour forth. And although I’ve never had a single typing lesson, just from years and years of working with keyboards (both as a computer guy and a writer) I do type very fast, too.
(Against this latter speed you have to weigh, however, my neurotic hyper-awareness of typos and awkwardness as I commit them, causing me to back up and overtype quite a bit. (Just then, I typed wuite, braked, threw it into reverse, and replaced the w with a q before moving on.))
Still, in light of my creative frozen-ness of recent weeks, I really welcomed the WYAO Write-a-Thon’s 3K Challenge. So when I took my first break and did a quick word-count check, and saw that the odometer had rolled over to four digits, I exulted.
You take what you can get, hmm?
Anyway, if you’d like to see what I accomplished today — the start of (presumably) a short story, or possibly something longer — the first third of it is posted here. And if you want to see all the 3,100-some words, you can find them in this (74KB) PDF.
(Thanks, everyone, for your good wishes as I embarked on this mini-project!)
As a reminder — not that you doubted! — I’ll be intensely preoccupied tomorrow, for the 2010 edition of the New York Writers Coalition’s Write Your A** Off Day.