Clockwork

While there remain five days yet in the month, and I am not done writing (nor will I be for many months I should think), I feel it is time tell the last of my November writing adventures. I intended to be more regular in posting here, and as with all things time found itself spread unfortunately thin.

The first three days of the month resulted with two pages each (if you have not seen my pages, they have no margins and hold about 1,200 words each), a pace that I did not expect I would be able to keep through the entire month. I will admit, there were days where I nearly did not make it and only by writing through other, probably more important, commitments was I able to come out ahead.

Last year and the year before and the year before that, I averaged in the 1,800 range per day, writing more on Wednesdays during the Sage Lounge Write-ins. Unfortunately, those did not happen this year (if they did, I missed word of them), so I had to force myself to write everywhere else to stay ahead. If all goes according to plan, I will end this month just shy of 70k, the most I have ever written in a month.

As with any time I write, I am always surprised by what becomes of it. I fell into the unfortunate habit of never planning anything, and now four years later I am still winging it. This month I, a part of the story itself I feel at times, travelled into the deep places of the world, discovered machines of war so terrible in their power to level cities, what happens when someone steals another's memories and tries to use them for their own, the faces of villains and heroes, the hunger of starving wolves, reunions of friends old and new, and above all my curiosity of how this journey will end.

Like clockwork the words appeared on the pages and through struggles in motivation and creative voids, I watch as the days tick past and the story grows. For those of you who may have been writing this year, however far you may have come, there is still time for you to reach the end. Whether in the next five days or in the passing months, you are that much farther ahead of where you may have been a month ago. They say the only bad story, the only bad draft, is the one that is not yet written.

Write On.

JSP