Apperantly all I need is 1,000 true fans in order to make a living online from my writing.

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

So after a day of cutting and pasting and generally rearranging chapters and scenes - and then rearranging them back to more or less where they started at - I now have a new design for Alice finished.

I’m pretty pleased with the result as it’s not everyday I go from having completed 49% of a project to being 66% complete without actually writing any new words. In fact I lost about 2,500 words in the reorganisation, so if I had of found a way to keep those half written scenes I would have even more of my project completed. But there was no way I could make them fit. I happily gave them up in order to get nearer the end of writing Alice.

So now I’m toying with the idea of starting a new art form the “Author as Performance Artist”. If I keep my readers entertained with amusing posts about the progress in my writing maybe I can build up a loyal readership - a readership that might even someday buy my books.

However I also risk destroying the mystique of the author by revealing all the changes and rewrites and plain mistakes that I make as I write. And also that I can get so fed up with writing a novel that I just want to get it finished by any means necessary(including cutting a quater of the storyline out of it) in order to have done with it once and for all.

OK - My resolution to write 1,000 words a day for the month of September and get my novel Alice finished has hit a little speed bump. I did no writing Sunday or Monday. Also I did very little on Saturday and Friday.

The reason I did no writing was, paradoxically,  because I had nothing else to do over the weekend except write. I was alone in the house(with my dog) for two whole days so what did I do? Did I knuckle down and write 10,000 words words of my novel. No I did not. Instead I “ran around like a headless chicken” writing a little bit of this story and a little bit of this story, writing a little scene, doing a little plotting, rearranging a couple of chapters. But in at the end I had no finished story, or chapter, or anything to really show for all the free time spend in front of the computer.

It is almost like some bizarre form of writers block, an analysis paralysis for the writer. Except instead of being overwhelmed with the amount of information coming into me I am overwhelmed with the amount of ideas I have for stories I should be writing.

Some Good News

My average word count for the first two weeks of September is 569. While this is somewhat short of my 1,000 words a day target it is much better than the 157 words/day I was averaging between 18th May (when I started to keep a daily word count) and the end of August. So my attempt at a target of 1,000 words/day is improving my overall productivity. And I can see no resulting drop in quality. When I’m writing 10,000 words a day I’ll see what the quality is

Back on Track

However my resolution was to finish Alice by writing 1,000 words a day. The main goal wasn’t just writing 1,000 words a day it was getting Alice finished by the end of the month. I now find, by a careful analysis of the chapter summaries I have for Alice that there are 3 chapters with basically nothing in them. If I remove 3 chapters from my novel I remove the need to write 15-20,000 words(I average 5-7,000 words/chapter.) So a little cut and paste, rewrite a couple of scenes and I only need 12,000 words to finish the story.

The only flaw with this plan is that I still need to write 1,000 words per day for the rest of the month. But it’s now the plan that I am working towards. We’ll see how far I get this time. You never know on the 28th I may realise that there is another chapter I don’t really need to make this story work

OK - not good news on making my 1,000 words a day goal.

On Sunday I wrote 475 words. But Monday I only added 53 words to Alice. And on Tuesday I did 0, yes zero, words. I got a bit blocked on a scene in chapter 3 and instead of switching to another part of the story I tried to work my way through it and wasted a day. On Wednesday I did what I should have done on Tuesday and stop working on the scene in Alice where I was blocked and I did 727 words. Unfortunately it was 727 words on another story. However I was writing again.

On Thursday I had to travel for work so I didn’t get too much time to write, but I did get 398 words written.

So far this week I’ve managed an average of 168 words/day. The bad news is I’m not reaching my target of 1,000 words/day, which I need if I am to have any hope of making a living as a writer. But the good news is that I am writing every day and still making progress.

Now I just have to focus on finishing Alice ASAP so that I have a finished novel I can sell.