The year in writing review meme

I got this one from sosostris2012. It's a different take on the first line meme. This is everything I worked on in 2006, finished or not. (So, I cheated a little with some of these and put the opening paragraph down—but only on a few.)

If this had been a list of everything I finished in 2006, it would be a short list indeed: Night Warrior, a novel. I did a lot of revising this year, some of it quite extensive (Shivery Bones) and started some stories, but the only thing I actually finished was NW. That novel just about killed me, which seemed to be a theme for the year.

( Behind a cut to reduce boredom. )

750 a day is reasonable?

Just went over to novel_in_90 and read the userinfo. I'm very glad to hear 750 a day is consdiered a reasonable amount for a professional writer. I've been doing that in longhand every day (except for those days when I do 500 or 250 because my brain's gone freeze dried). So why have I been beating myself up? And why haven't I ever finished a novel in 90 days?

Answer: those 500 and 250 days + my novels are too long + doing other projects on the weekens. If I brought my novels in at 80-100k, eschewed other projects, and didn't write in longhand, maybe I, too, could do it.

I'm on my way to solving one of those problems. My Neo will be arriving midweek and I won't have to write in longhand on my lunches anymore. We'll see if it makes any difference.

A dork I am

Sometimes I leave my posts on private when I post them so I can proof them to see if the formatting worked. I just discovered that I forgot to take my January 3 post off private. Not really a particularly fascinating entry, but the quote of the day for that day was a good one, so I'm reposting it here:


Random quote of the day:

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."

—Daniel J. Boorstin, interview, NewsHour