Morning

Well it’s a new day … I’m up but not really awake yet … still working on that so please excuse any apparent wandering or pointlessness to the rant. I don’t really have anything that’s got me fired up in any case so it’s probably not going to be much of a rant, we’ll just have to wait and see … maybe once I drink some coffee.

It’s Tuesday, a day only slightly better than Monday and still a long way from the universally coveted Friday, but so far I really can’t complain it doesn’t look to be shaping up to be a bad day at all.

For those of you who are interested in following the progress on my month long journey into insanity I can report that my novel reached page 31 and word 14,533 last night. Which to reach 50,000 words by the end of 31 days I would need to be to a scant 14,517 or so, and only 16,130 by the end of tonight to maintain the schedule. (1,613 words a day doesn’t sound like much until you try to write them.)

My wife is traipsing along this journey with me, but … let’s just say she’s behind on the word count. I will have to say that one of the things that the author of ‘No Plot, No Problem’ says is certainly true … When you have nothing to do but write, you’ll do everything EXCEPT write.

In her defense, she’s not really a writer per-say. I write … I never finish anything but I write … have for as long as I can remember. My first attempt to write a novel was, maybe 6th grade or so. That novel saw countless revisions on through high school and even in bits and pieces in college. It’s still there, but I don’t know that it will ever get written at this point … maybe one day I’ll get a large enough crowbar to wrench it out of my skull and get it onto paper … or whatever we’re using by that time.

I’ve also taken a college course on Creative Writing … now THERE was a waste of time. The professor could write, and if there is ever a call for conversations in grocery stores that make people want to start a grocery list, I’m sure that she’ll do very well. It was certainly a good exercise in learning to ignore critics, or at least sift through their comments for useful bits of information while ignoring the attacks on the work. In essence I didn’t learn anything in the class that I didn’t already know and the entire semester can be boiled down to ‘to be a better writer, learn to be a better reader’ and ‘symbolism isn’t something you write into a story, it’s something that happens; just write and leave the figuring out the symbolism to literature professors with too much time on their hands.’

Ah well … time to get outta the chair and go to work. Since I won’t have time to write more there today I’ll post this, but before I go I want to make sure that my readers are well informed about a new psychological syndrome … Attention Surplus Syndrome (thanks to Mike Adams for bringing that to everyone’s attention)