I’ve not spent an entire fortnight1 back in Fort Madison, I don’t think, considering some of the activities of those days. I spent one day traveling back and forth between here and Des Moines for a book fair, and a second day trundling up to the Quad Cities to attend the annual meeting of the Midwest Writing Center, and then Memorial Day was a wash.
My wife and I got to go to Chicago for the majority of last weekend. It is usually a four-hour-plus drive there from our town, but it was a little faster and much more convenient on Amtrak, my first-ever ride on the service. I think I actually might write about the experience this upcoming weekend.
Long story short, with all of this traveling around and other business, there was not as much time for writing as I had hoped for when I got off the long traveling/commuting road I’d been on for the past three and a half months. I did manage to get a bit more writing done last week than the previous week, but it was unimpressive at best.
The stats:
Writing statistics for the week ending 1 June 2024:
3,536 words written.
Days writing: 3 of 7.
Days revising/planning: 3 of 7 for 300 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 6 of 7 days.
From what I see on my schedule, I believe I have somewhere around nine and a half weeks2 to really buckle down and produce a lot of good writing before I have to start settling in and getting ready for the next school year at my new job.
As of right now, I’m not sure how many thousands of words I am behind pace to write at least 200,000 words for the year 2024. For once, I’m not going to check how many words exactly I am behind. What I am going to do is write like hell for those next nine and a half weeks with the intention of, if not totally eliminating the deficit, at least cutting it down so 200,000 words is a reachable goal by the end of this calendar year. In all fairness, this plan might not work. However, I didn’t finally become a published writer by just starting at a screen. If I fall short of my goal, I want to make sure I went down swinging.
I need to get back to the writing. We’ll talk later.
- Two weeks, if you were curious. I didn’t know what that meant until a couple years back, even though I’d heard the announcers use the word whenever they described how long the Wimbledon tennis tournament lasted. ↩︎
- Pun intended. ↩︎