Challenges Are Battles Against Yourself…

Nothing Else Matters… Just You…

Challenges have this nasty habit of quickly uncovering issues in your motivation and your consistency in writing and other life issues you are dealing with.

This challenge for me uncovered that my vision stamina is not strong yet. If I spend a lot of time during the day, as I did a few days this last week, at my business computer, by the time I get to the writing computer, I am very limited in the amount of time I have.

I love writing at night, and my eyes are better at night. I expected to be slow, didn’t expect that sight issue would be the main reason, even though I should have. But I will work through it and get stronger by the week.

I got a question about how many words I do when I am back to full speed on the writing fiction. Answer: Damned if I know. I have been known to write 90,000 word novels in days, or sometimes I just putter on various things and it takes me three weeks to write a short novel while I am doing other things.

Last spring I wrote over a hundred regular-sized shortstories in the same amount of days and did two novels at the same time. Then I slowed way down for reasons and then went blind in October for no reason I can figure.

Most years over the last twenty years I did about 1.3 to 1.5 million consumable words per year.

I kind of expect to write about a 100,000 words of fiction a month once I am back up and running, so that, combined with the nonfiction introductions and blog posts will get me past a million as I hoped. But could I do that now? Nope. This week I got about 12,000 consumable words and that feels great.

Next week if I can get that up around 20,000 words, I will be on the road.

That’s how I look at it.

And I hope to be back to my normal consistent but not consistent style. I write a lot, then I don’t, but I love it a lot more when I am writing a lot. Just is easier.

But every year it just adds up.

So if suddenly things start happening that keep you from writing and having fun with the writing, figure the problems out and fix them. Now.

9 months is a long time. And yet not much time at all.