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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.<\/p>\nSo, 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n And then finally opened up the old blogging dashboard.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n (Against this latter speed you have to weigh, however, my neurotic hyper-awareness of typos and awkwardness as I commit them<\/em>, causing me to back up and overtype quite a bit. (Just then, I typed wuite<\/em>, braked, threw it into reverse, and replaced the w<\/em> with a q<\/em> before moving on.))<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You take what you can get, hmm?<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. And if you want to see all the 3,100-some words, you can find them in this (74KB) PDF<\/a>.<\/p>\n (Thanks, everyone, for your good wishes as I embarked on this mini-project!)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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