Man, this writing thing is tough.
So, I stayed up way, way, way too late last night. I would normally try and come up with some stupid bullshit excuses like "oh, hey, yeah, I was totally planning my whole year's writing schedule", or "I was doing intensive research on the railway lines and schedules for the middle part of South Carolina", or maybe even "there was a total alien invasion last night that was centered on my house last night, so I was up super-duper late fighting them off with my junior-sized Louisville Slugger, a can of lighter fluid, and my car keys, and successfully fought them all off, so, hey world, y'know, you're welcome," and I'd even like to think that I'm a confident and competent enough tale-teller that you guys would buy it.
The truth is, however, I was watching music videos on YouTube and playing the "just one more" game (I trust you are all aware of how that game works). When I finally crawled into bed at 6 AM, I thought that I would be fine. I had planned on waking up at ten to get started on my day, but this had now been pushed back to closer to noon or one, depending on how lazy I was feeling when I woke up.
Truth be told, I was a little disappointed in myself; it's always a bad idea to set a goal, and then immediately fuck that goal over before you even have a chance to reach it. I, however, figured that, to hell with it, I'm the only person who's allowed to be mad at myself if I screw up, and I'm not going to be mad, so who cares? With that in my head, I spiraled down into sleep just after six.
....and promptly woke up, sans alarm, at 10:25. Not PM, y'all. AM. My brain - which, to be clear, I have spent the last 2 weeks realigning to be on more of a daytime schedule - woke me up, got me out of bed, slapped me twice across the face before throwing me up against the wall and whispering menacingly into my ear "you made a promise, you arrogant goddamn prick, and this is your punishment. Get yourself cleaned up and get into your office before I CRUSH YOUR SKULL AND MURDER YOU WITH MY DICK" (I'm paraphrasing here). So, after showering and making a pot of coffee, I went in, sat down, and started pecking away. After three hours, I had made some progress, but not as much as I would have liked.
NOW, to be fair, I was working on a chapter that had gotten away from me about two months ago (roughly the time when I stopped writing it) so I had to basically think quickly enough to get past that part and move on, which I did manage to do, so, go me. Even so, I feel like what I did produce wasn't near where it should have been. Despite this fact, however, I'm going to go ahead and put the numbers in here at the bottom as a way of measuring (quantitatively, anyway) my output thus far on the Super Six project.
Quick little FYI: as a means of clarification, I already have a lot of words written as a whole for this project, but we're resetting the actual counter at zero in an effort to keep this an honest record. With any luck, we'll see a big jump numbers-wise tomorrow.
Oh, and before any of you waggish types out there start throwing me some shit about "quantity vs. quality", YES, I KNOW, I GET IT. It's better to write one page of pure genius than thirty pages of total fucking incoherent trash. I totally agree with that, and I'm sure most of you would as well. See, except, I'd be willing to bet all of you have at least one Dan Brown book on your shelves, and that guy writes nothing but total fucking incoherent trash (And I'm not knocking it; hell if *I* could make millions of dollars writing incoherent trash, I'd be deep into that like racists at a Newt Gingrich rally [too soon?]). And, to be honest, right now I need to generate content, which can eventually be called a completed first draft, and which can then sit unseen on my desktop for months in a delicate little process I like to call editing. So, yeah, quantity now, quality later, sex and drugs and rock 'n roll next week (Just kidding, I'm certainly not having sex anytime soon).
So, without further ado, I would like to present, The Number, day one: 721.
(Let's hope that goes up tomorrow by, like, a lot. I'd hate to have to work on a beet farm to pay the bills because, dude, beets. Ew.)
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