Monday, November 12, 2007

Book Report

If you haven't visited in the last week or so you might have missed a new feature here at archy. Take a look over on the left sidebar. Near the top is a little meter labeled "Mammoth Tales progress." This is my attempt to force myself to work on my mammoth book by making a public commitment to produce 12,000 words this month. If I fail, I humiliate myself in front of dozens of people and will never be able to show my face in Blogtopia (and, yes, Skippy coined that term) again. At the end of the first week, I have produced 2078 words, which is a little short of where I should be. Never fear. For me at least, the main difference between fiction and non-fiction writing is the pace. In fiction writing it's possible to develop a disciplined steady pace and write a for a given period each day or produce a quota in words or pages. In non-fiction, working doesn't always mean writing. Research time can easily outnumber writing time by an order of magnitude. Last week I really only wrote on one day and spent the rest researching. This week I expect to write a bit more. Hopefully it will all work out to mean 12,000 words by the end of the month. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I got a pretty cool contract writing job that will pay some bills for the next few weeks. It looks like the kids will be getting new catnip toys this Christmas, after all.

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