Crikey - I still seem to be keeping up a ridiculous rate of output: nearly 1,000 words a day, on average, across the two blogs. If I channelled all that industry into something more saleable.... I could have a novel done in three or four months!
And that wasn't the half of it. Well, not quite. I also knocked out something like 20,000 words for assorted training materials, and took on a slew of heavy-duty editing tasks that probably totalled at least that much again (and seemed like 10 times more!). I worry I may be bringing on carpal tunnel syndrome....
Anyway, the stats:
There were 37 posts and around 18,000 words on Froogville last month.
There were 33 posts and over 11,000 words on Round-The-World Barstool Blues.
In my visitor breakdown from Statcounter, I discover that - after long being cruelly ignored by the denizens of The Great White North - I suddenly have regular visitors (to both blogs) in Canada. Even more intriguingly, The Barstool seems to have acquired a fan in the small Croatian city of Rijeka.
I'm also extremely pleased to have attracted some very stimulating new commenters in this past month or so. I do hope they'll be sticking around, and sharing their thoughts with us often.
7 comments:
Impressive tallies indeed!
I feel certain that if I knew where to look, I'd find the answer to this question in your earlier posts--maybe you can direct me!--but do you have ideas for novels, that you've simply never gotten around to putting on paper (/screen)? Or are you still on the hunt for plots worthy of your skills and energies?
Now, that is spooky, Cedra. I had just been thinking - over this past week or so - of instituting a new occasional series on here outlining the story ideas I've abandoned over the years.
I did post possible opening for a novel a year or so ago. There are others, many others.
Ah yes. The "if I weren't blogging, I'd be writing a novel" neurosis. I know it well. There may be something in it. This is usually cast in rather Newtonian-physics lingo, implying some imaginary law of creative thermodynamics: the total verbiage in my head is a constant, and can neither be created nor destroyed, just channeled into one form or another.
People also say they work themselves out of the compulsion to write, in a sort of Freudian pneumatics/hydraulics analogy -- as if they're worried about, er, firing off their libido prematurely.
Obviously I've been thinking way too much about this.
Well, I generally think about it in the more mundane terms of time, JES. I have this much time available to write; I use nearly all of it (and then some!) on blogging.
I've often heard writers - or rather, publishers - counsel against blogging because it may satisfy an urge to reach an audience (in however different and/or a more limited way than publishing a book), and so diminish a would-be novelist's motivation.
The writer Dave Hickey says similar things about teaching--that once we have a captive audience, our burning need for attention is sated!
I'm not sure if I buy it--mostly because I think people's motivation for writing/performing/creating differs pretty widely from person to person--but it did give me pause to hear it said.
Now I have to go away and Google Dave Hickey...
Yeah -- there's an agent named Donald Maas who speaks of blogging as a way to "scratch the itch" to write; once scratched, the itch diminishes.
Yes, time is the real enemy. (That, and the siren call of an audience.)
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