Word count today: 1700

Total word count: 9250

This isn't the only thing I'm going to write about in November, but I will weigh in with short updates to document my progress. I wrote about 1700 words today, and my total word count is 9250. At this point I'm a bit ahead of schedule, because this is the first day I've "only" written the required 1667 or so words (it's a requirement in the sense that it's the pace needed to stay on track; nobody's having me turn in my work at the end of the day). I would describe my two-plus pages today as uninspired (to put it very kindly). It's the kind of thing I would have deleted without the pressure of the word count, and that's kind of the point.

I ran across an NPR article on National Novel Writing Month in which they asked a number of published authors about their writing habits and how they deal with writer's block. They generally described some kind of routine (anything from keeping regular office hours to grabbing a table at Panera--preferably one with a power outlet nearby), and a commitment to work through moments of weak inspiration or bad writing. In other words, they treat it like a job.

I have some experience with that; one of the first and best lessons I learned in my line of work was that a radio show that lives and dies on rushes of creativity will mostly die. My core philosophy (from a programming standpoint) is to find a place where I can create a consistent product every day, rather than serving up my best show ever on Monday, followed by my worst show ever on Tuesday. I shoot for a level of quality I can maintain over the long haul. That's pretty much how these authors describe their work. Regarding writer's block, a number of them said that you can edit two pages of bad writing, but you can't edit a blank page. So, today was one of those days. I'm only three days into this experiment, and I've already learned some useful stuff:

1. Two pages a day is not unreasonable output for a person who's writing
part-time.
2. In all likelihood, you'll never read this or any other novel with my
name on it.
3. The Internet is a great place to go for research, although you have to
work a bit harder to verify your sources.
4. I'm much better at reading sci-fi than I am at writing it.

My favorite response to the writer's block question was the woman who said that when she wrote her first novel, she was a working mother with several small kids, and didn't have time for the luxury of writer's block. If she had ten minutes to spare, she wrote something.

Total word count: