Writing about the writing I have written (AKA first journal entry).

If there might be one thing that you might come to realize in reading through this blog, it might be that there have been times where I have not written or pursued fiction. In fact, there have been a lot of times where I’ve gone years without putting down a single word of fiction, despite wanting to be a novelist ever since my teens.

When it comes down to it, I would blame much of those times on distractions, both print and electronic, procrastination, and the fact that I never saw fiction writing as a main income, even as a kid. I always was writing something, but when it came to journalism or teaching, much of that writing energy was sucked into the nonfiction work I was doing.

During the past three years, however, I have found myself taking steps to dramatically improve my writing output. One of those has been keeping a writing journal, detailing how many words I had written, revised, or cut during a particular day. Doing that always made me feel that I was keeping myself accountable for what I wrote, even on days when I didn’t write anything. (On those days, I indicated the amount of writing I did with simply “zip.”)

Now, however, I’ve taken a couple of months off of my fiction writing after finishing the last round of editing to my current project. To get back into the swing of things, I have decided that every week, I will be publishing my weekly output here, as a way of being publicly accountable as well as personally accountable.

This journal will only cover the past three days. As always, this will cover any fiction writing that I do – none of my blog writing or other work will be counted in these numbers.

Journal for 7/6-8/2017:

832 words written, 500 words cut, word difference of +332; 1,000 words reviewed (American 9). Current manuscript: 20,351 words.

Days worked: 3 of 3.

These journal posts will typically be among my shorter ones on the blog, with them including the numbers for the week and any brief thoughts I had about what I produced. Hopefully the numbers and rate will continue to climb. Future posts will include everything I did for the past week’s work.

Hope you’re getting some good work done, as well.