116000 Words
At the pace I've set for myself as a minimum, 400 words a day, and about 20% of my time given to editing, that puts me at an output of about 116000 words a year being generated towards one story or another.
Instead of lamenting the quickening perception of the passage of time, I'm trying to harness it in such a way as to play that effect off against my psychology. The psychology that had me feeling like it would take too long to accomplish anything of substance. The impatient part of my psyche.
It feels like cheating. I'm still impatient as ever, but I don't have time these days to care about being impatient. There's more things to do in a day than time in which to do it. It's a good problem to have, and adding a daily output of some sort means I can in short order accrue volume of output from which to work
In the last 20 days I've put out about 6000 words towards my novella. On track to completing 10000 by the end of May. Past me would have said that only 4oo words a day isn't enough. That I should sacrifice other things to output more than that. I've always been a 'door in the face' person with myself. All or nothing. It's usually ended up with 'nothing' being the prescription for the day.
Trying to become a 'foot in the door' person with myself has started to yield gains and meagre as my past self might see them on the day to day, after a month, 2 months, 3 months of this pace, it's a heap. Something of which to be proud.
Flip the script. I suppose it's easy for me to say that all I needed to do was a little every day, and it's working out quite well for me now, why was I such an idiot in the past. What I need to understand is that my psychology has also changed in some way to give me a fire in my belly about writing in a way it wasn't in existence before. A growing belief that no matter how amateurish I find parts of my writing now, that writing more will improve it, and that I have a chance at being a successful writer.
Believing that you have a chance at being something you desire is a powerful tool. A wall I've often hit in learning everything, the wall my potential has always hit, is difficulty of progression. The attentive care it takes to improve and grow.
In any case, this is where I am. This is the pace I have room for in my life right now amongst gardening, family rearing, husbanding, communitying, working. I'm okay with this pace. I'm okay with chipping away at resistance every single day so that my rust-coat remains in tact. The fear that a single day of not putting in my time will lead to a nick, which will lead to the formation of rust and progression of entropy is real.
My next big trick will be, when it comes to pass that I am not able to write in a day. That I'm able to forgive myself and leap back into the routine the next day anyway. To effectively buff out the speck of rust, and re-coat it again.
Peace,
Shane