Write Every Day, They Said. It's A Good Idea, They Said.

I've written 14,000 words in the past two weeks.


It's not a lot - I would already be behind by NaNoWriMo standards - but it's 14,000 words I didn't have two weeks ago, 14,000 words I'd been trying to put down on paper for about two months. It's 14,000 words of a single night, a night where everything starts rolling into motion for my characters.


I think somewhere along the way I stopped thinking about Halfer, and other projects, in terms of word count. It's such a weird arbitrary thing when I think about it. A short story of 7,500 words, a novel of 50,000...does one automatically become more meaningful and important than the other? Is 50 Shades of Gray more consequential than "The Lottery" just because it happens to prop up the gimpy leg on your coffee table?




I gave it to Dan, who had so unscrupulously (albeit lovingly) binned the last several pages I had asked him to read (first "mistake": giving the 23 year old guy the YA girly fiction). This was, actually, why I emailed them to him. I'd rather have someone who will be brutally honest read my pages then someone who would shower me with false compliments*. So when he messaged me back to tell me they were a million times better than the last bit he'd gotten, I felt for the first time the absolute strangest sensation. I felt like I accomplished something.


So I've written 14,000 words, but in reality, I wrote a single Midwinter night. I pushed three (arguably four) plot lines ahead and started the big, overarching story for Rena and her crew. I developed a religious ceremony and I had some friendships deepen in ways even I didn't see coming. I introduced two new and important characters and best of all: I didn't delete any of it.** That seems more important to me, I think.


So here's to getting past Midwinter, however seasonally displaced it was!


I'm gonna go make some tea (side note: I used to only drink chai but I'm falling more and more in love with cinnamon teas in all their forms. So far Harney and Son's Hot Cinnamon Spice is the best!) and slaughter some demons. But I'll be posting some more tomorrow, this time I promise.


* Not true. I'm a big baby.


** Also not true, but adds to my point. If I write 500 words, for example, and delete them before walking away from my laptop, did I still write 500 words? Or does that famous piece of writing advice really mean "write the perfect words the first time every day?" In which case, how does anyone ever actually get anything done?