23.714 words. As of this morning, January 20th, I’ve written 23,714 words of literature. I’m pretty gobsmacked by that number, actually. It’s more than 4,500 words above the amount I set for myself based on a daily expected average of 959 words. I’ve completed one story but for the ending, have made real progress into another, started a third, and begun a couple of new novel-length works. One is for class and is about a man who is unable to form relationships and who fixes and sells antique watches for a living falling into a friendship with a woman who is in and out of relationships constantly. The two find a book in a library, a book of Medieval text on raising ghosts that doesn’t seem to have ever existed, and it leads them into… well some sort of adventure involving spirits of course, I am a fantasy author after all. The other is a novel about a drug addicted cop who is dead, who comes back as a ghost, and who must solve his murder by inhabiting the bodies of living people to do his investigation. But the mental aspects his addiction remain, and he is constantly drawn to heroin addicts as the people he must use to find out who killed him.
That doesn’t count the writing I’ve done for school of course, mostly replies to the weekly reading questions and discussions from other students. I did come up with another story idea during “class” this week (hesitate to use the term since this is an all online course and there aren’t formal class times as such). What if a man on vacation accidentally leaves his wife behind at a rest stop they take, and when he returns a couple of hours later to find her, she is missing and no one remembers her, not even her own family? There’s a really nice hook in there, and some intriguing questions about how you “forget” your spouse and drive an hour without realizing she’s not in the car with you, let alone the more metaphysical part of no one remembering her.
23.714 words so far this year. 326,286 more to go before January 1st of 2017. With a huge snowstorm now expected for Friday and Saturday, I hope to make another sizeable dent in the remaining total. Now if only someone would start paying me for the right to publish what I’m producing… one step at a time, though.
Bonus thought: Sarah Palin endorses Trump. Now he can add a white trash endorsement to his white supremacist endorsements. Yeah, I said it… I’m not proud, but I said it. Suck it up, buttercup.