Weekly Word Count: February 12

What Is This?

Following the lead of my mentor, friend, and exemplar, Tami Moore, this is a weekly article to document progress in meeting my writing goals as described here.

I use an Excel spreadsheet to track all my work by category (blog post, copyediting work, creative writing) and item. So all I need to do is add up the “words” column and I’m good to go. I’ve also decided to give this article half-credit, since I do a bit more than just paste boilerplate and fill in numbers (see the next section, for example). However, it will be counted in the following week’s total.

Blog posts and creative writing count full credit (with the exception of this weekly article, which counts half credit). Copyediting for other writers is counted at ten percent of the actual word count for the document; style sheets for that copyediting will count twenty-five percent. Editing my own work, if and when I get to that point, will count fifty percent of starting word count. 

How Did I Do?

My weekly goal is 2,000 words. This week, I published three articles to the blog, one of which was a creative writing effort.

• Weekly Word-Count: February 5 – Blog Post @ 50 percent: 317 words
• Feather Path,How Chapter 7: "Betrayal"¹ – Copyediting @ 10 percent:  266 words 
• Darklight, Chapter 2 (continued)  – Creative writing: 1627 words

Total: 2,217 words. Still on target, but I’m (only slightly) concerned that my output has been steadily declining the past few weeks. Of course, I can attribute that to the distractions of being on vacation. And until I really commit myself to doing some serious writing, whether on Darklight or other fiction, that excuse will work. 

On a more positive note, when I wasn’t writing, I was reading. And as Tami (and others) have stressed, if you’re going to be a good writer, it’s every bit as important that you read. During the two weeks I spent in California, I read six novels. That’s six more novels than I read in all of 2009; in 2008, I think I read one. And believe me, I experienced yet another epiphany. While I didn’t doubt those who preach that writers must also be readers, it’s a completely different thing to arrive at that conclusion empirically. 

As I read Robert Ludlum’s The Ambler Warning, it struck me that, thus far, Darklight contains a lot of dialogue. In fact, Chapter 2 (at least the part I’ve written so far: there are still a couple scenes to be drafted) is almost completely dialogue. Of course, part of that dialogue is a pretty dramatic scene, which also provides quite a bit of insight (I hope) into the character of the heroine. But now I understand that I can communicate just as effectively, and doubtless more concisely, through narrative instead of dialogue. I can’t wait to put this discovery to the test!

Florida

If you’ve been following the blog for any time at all, you know I’m at the Walt Disney Resort through the 17th. Today was one of those days a parent (or, in my case, a grandparent) lives for. Alison woke her mother at 4 a.m. this morning, urging her to "Get up! GET UP! We need to get ready to go to Disney!" And she was every bit as animated all afternoon, after flying down from St. Louis and being picked up at the airport by her dad. 

We finally got to the Magic Kingdom shortly after noon, and she was running and skipping everywhere, until we left for the day about 5 p.m. The glowing smile and ready laugh she had all day long lightened everyone’s step, and I had as much fun watching her have fun as anything I’ve done in a long time. It’s going to be quite a week.

Poor tyke: We were discussing dinner plans, and she proclaimed she wanted steak. So we found a steakhouse, but the was really starting to lose it, and the grilled cheese sandwich and fries appealed much more than steak. She managed to eat half the sandwich; not sure she had even one fry; drank about a third of her milk, before she laid her head down on Grandpa’s lap. At that point, we transferred her to Mom’s lap (roomier on that side of the booth), and she was lost to the world, including a 20-minute trek through a Publix while the adults stocked up on groceries to last a few days (breakfasts, at least).

Still…I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings at Epcot (I was last there in 1983 or ’84). Well, except for the steady rain that is forecast to bring us at least a half-inch of rain. Ugh. Beats the hell out of two feet of snow, though!