I took the first two weeks of October off from writing Alice in order to recharge my batteries regarding that story. Instead I have been writing short stories, so that I have some complete works to post and satisfy you, my loyal readers, and the 50% of visitors that take one look at my site and immediately hit the back button

But I seem incapable of starting a story and finishing with the characters in one short story. I have gotten 3 stories written, well almost they all need a little more polish before they can see the light of day. But already I have at least one sequel for each story. And one story has at least 5 subsequent scenes involving the same two main characters. That’s a novella of 20,000 words in the making.

The same thing happened to me last year when I wrote Seducing a Girl. It was meant to be a stand alone short story, but ended up being 7,000 words long and the first chapter of a Justine. I will be finishing Justine just as soon as I can figure out how to make the three major strands in the story/characters intertwine into a cohesive whole.

But the good thing about writing these new stories, and Seducing a Girl, is that they had a beginning, middle and end of their own and so can be enjoyed as stand alone stories without you, my loyal readers, having to wait 2, or 3, years for me to finish the complete novel.

So look out over the next few weeks to reading these new stories as I post them here on my blog. Subscribe to my newsletter and be the first to read these new stories. Or don’t subscribe and read them a week or so later

Here is the summary of week one of my September Resolution to write 1,000 words a day and finish my novel Alice.

I wrote a total of 2,614 words which averages at 373.43 words per day. However only 1,718 words were in Alice the other 896 where on other stories. (I’ve actually lost count of the number of stories/novels I’m currently “working” on.) Either way I have not managed 1,000 per day.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can improve my daily word count is to get up earlier in the morning. I find that if I get an early start I can get a good bit done before the kids wake and the daily routines kick in. I’ve not been very successful in integrating my writing time into daily life. I have also tried staying up late but find I am often too tired to work properly.  So I’ll will have to make extra time by getting up earlier.

Now, I am not naturally an early riser. I have had to get up early in the past (5:30 - 6:00 am) but the longest I’ve managed to maintain it was 6-8 weeks. (You would think that after 6 weeks getting out of bed early would have become an ingrained habit, but not with me.) However now I know that I only have to become an early riser for 3 weeks, until I complete my September Resolution, and also that I am getting up to do something that I want to do (As opposed to previous periods of early rising where I was getting out of bed to commence a very long commute to work.) I am hoping that I will be able to get out of bed at 6:00am for the next 3 weeks. And that once out of bed(notice I don’t use the word awake) I will be able to do productive work.

I’ll let you know how it works out here on my blog. So subscribe to my RSS feed for updates.

I have resolved to finish Alice this month. It is now two years since I started writing it and it is time I finished it and moved on to something new. I have no shortage of ideas for stories. Of course I haven’t spent the last two years working solely on this one novel. I keep getting distracted with all those new/better story ideas and writing outlines and sometimes whole scenes and even whole chapters.  I keep thinking I should be writing short stories so that I have some “finished product” to show potential readers/fans. But these short stories keep turning ito full length novels. I would say that I have ADHD if it were not for the fact that I don’t believe ADHD is a real illness.

So my plan is to write 1,000 words a day for the next month and complete Alice. Biased on the size of completed chapters I have a little over 29,000 words to go.

I am taking my inspiration from both the National Novel Writing Month and from 30 Days to Success by Steve Pavlina. I know it is possible to write 1,000 words a day and I know that setting a limit of only doing it for one month means that it does not seem like such a daunting task, like a complete lifestyle change would be. But then as I am going through my Mid Life Crises maybe a complete lifestyle change would do me some good

I am also thinking of publicly exposing myself by posting my word count for each day here on my blog. Of course I will have no problem posting on those days that I achieve, and exceed, my 1,000 word target. But how would I feel about days like yesterday where I only wrote 323 words of Alice. I also wrote 298 words of my Cinderella story and bits and pieces of other works so the total word count for the day wasn’t too bad. But I don’t want to bore my blog readers with posts along the lines of “Oh dear, I only wrote 128 words today, Woe is me.”

But we shall see.

Country Road

I have just turned 42 and have been thinking about my life, and my death, for the past while now.

I guess I am going through my Mid Life Crises. I am a bit late as the latest statistics that I can find show a life expectancy of 75.1 years for Irish Males. That would mean a “mid life” of 35.5. So at statistically at 42 I am already more than half way through my life. Even so I still feel, and act, like I am only 19.

However it doesn’t matter in the long run if I live for another two, twenty, or two hundred years(though I’d prefer the latter) because in the thousands of years of recorded, and unrecorded, history of mankind it is such a small moment. And in the billions of years since the Earth formed my lifetime is less than the blink of an eye.

But mainly I am sad because life is like an unfolding story and I am always keen to find out what happens next. And once I am dead I will never get to see the ending.

Having said in my last post “I will be writing and doing nothing else.” I find that I did. Well I did do lots of other things, but I also did do a lot of writing. Last week I averaged 490 words per day. For me that is very good going.
However, while I celebrated the achievement of 3,436 words, unfortunately it was on a completely new story.
Yest having spent a weekend working on a new story “Domestic Service” at the beginning of December, I now find myself starting another new story at the beginning of January. And I already have 3 stories started that I need to complete!
I know that I am at the stage in my development as a writer that the stuff I write can reach out and touch people. The emails I receive and the comments left on this site are ample proof of that. But even I know that if I start a new novel length story every month or six weeks that I am not going to get anything finished.
So it seems that I have discovered a new form of writers block, where instead of staring at a blank sheet of paper/computer screen with nothing to write I in fact have too many ideas coming much too quickly for me to concentrate long enough on one to finish it.
“Writer’s Block” here being defined as anything that stops me from actually completing a work so that I can either post it on my site or try to find a traditional publisher to publish it. Yes, traditional publishers want the work to be finished before they will consider publishing it
Although I will have to come up with another description because “Writer’s Block” is hardly appropriate for a week that I averaged 490 words a day!