The Unholy Discipline of Counting Words

Writers are notorious procrastinators. They can think of an incredible number of ways to put off the act of writing. But they also feel guilty about it which fuels even more procrastination but that’s not my topic today. Maybe next time.

There’s a flip side to putting off the chore of writing. Writers want to write, at least on some level. Not only that, they want to finish things. They want to be disciplined and productive. So, like science-minded managers everywhere, they set targets for productivity.

“I will write 1,000 words per day until my novel is done,” is a common one. Or 500 words per day. Or 750. Or 2,000. The numbers vary but the intent is the same: To produce some amount of output consistently, like a professional.

At one time I set myself a goal of 1,000 words a day. When I’m on a roll, I can turn that out in an hour, easy. I’m rarely on a roll. Most days if I produce anything at all I count it a win. I would be more strict with myself if not for things like holding down a full time job and having a family. Those things come first. No matter how much I love writing, the responsibilities of life must be met.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t feel bad about this. It’s the life I’ve built for myself and I like it. Just stating the conditions. They are relevant to the question, “Would I raise my (alleged) daily target if I had more time? Like if I won the lottery or retired?” (Note: I figure winning the lottery is the only way I’m ever going to be able to afford to retire, so I probably should have put “and” in that sentence instead of “or.”)

Creative Backups

I got up early the other morning because I thought I was going to write a poem but it was a false alarm.

I don’t think that’s ever happened before. I often stay up late at night trying to finish a poem. Once in a while I get up after I’ve been in bed an hour or two to write down some notes or even to write a quick poem, just to get it out of my head. But getting up more than an hour before the alarm clock and then NOT write a poem?

To coin a phrase: Oy vey!

To be honest, I knew I wasn’t going to get very far with it before I got out of bed. But by that time I was awake. My brain was firing on several cylinders (maybe not all of them but I’m not a morning person). I figured that by the time I got back to sleep, it would be time to get up anyway.

So, once again, for the sake of a poem, I was not at my best during my work day. Fortunately, my job gives me some freedom to schedule my own activities. So I was able to avoid things I needed to be at my mental peak for. I read some reference materials, searched for some data I needed, did up a process sketch. Little stuff.

I can’t do that every day. Some days I have to actually think.

That’s one of the reasons I complain (possibly to excess) about the impossibility of controlling creativity. It happens when it happens. That’s all. Deal with it.

Except, when it doesn’t find a way out. My laptop died one day last week. I went out. When I came back the screen saver was partly frozen, and partly scrambled. I rebooted the laptop and it didn’t come back up. That was annoying. I have a lot of writing on my computer. Unfinished novels. Finished novels. Artwork for novels, NFTs and other stuff. Poems. Lots and lots of poems.

The night before I had finished chapter 8 of my next novel and started chapter 9. Now, I couldn’t get at it.

To Scribble or Not to Scribble?

Here’s a weird contrast. In the month of March 2022 (this year. Please try to keep up) I did not write a single poem. In April the same year, I’ve written 5 so far and the month is only half over.

I call this a weird contrast because I have no idea what’s different between March and April except … I have a cold. (Just a cold. Or a mild case of covid without all the symptoms. Or some other virus that’s mostly just annoying.)

Yes, I’ve been feeling kind of lousy for around a week. Slowly improving but not back to normal yet. And I’ve apparently also been more creative. As a second rate stand up comic might say, “What’s up with that?”

By the way, I don’t actually invest any effort in tracking these numbers. I’m not obsessive. When I write a poem, I throw it into a database. Then I can bring up a web page that shows me what I’ve done lately, complete with word and line counts, and date of creation. It took a little effort to write the system that tracks this for me but not really that much. It’s the sort of thing I do for a living after all and I did it years ago. So now, there’s no effort.

Just confusion.

The (Un)Secret Project

In my last post (here), I mentioned that I’ve been working on a secret project. That project is now live so I’m going to talk about it. Short version: I’m selling NFTs with poetry on them. Okay, trying to sell. Nothing has sold yet. But I’m at least in the market.

The longer version is going to take a bit. To begin with, skip this next part if you already know what an NFT is.

What’s an NFT?

First, there was Bitcoin. Bitcoin introduced the idea of a blockchain, which is basically a kind of distributed database for financial transactions with very strong protection against tampering. Really. That’s about it. The details of how it does this get pretty technical. You don’t need to know those details to understand this explanation.

There are some details that I need to bring up. Bitcoin is fairly straight forward. You send the coin to somewhere – called an address – and there it goes. Yes, there’s a proof and confirmation process but that all takes place in the background. It’s not super flexible. It’s not supposed to be.

Experimenting with Steem

Steem Experiment

Ever heard of Steem? (No I don’t mean ‘steam.’ My spelling is better than that.) It’s a social media site (https://steemit.com), an experiment in micropayments AND a kind of publishing platform as well. It’s kind of interesting.

Last week I finally got around to creating an account and looking over the content. The general idea is that every time someone upvotes something you post (More like Reddit upvotes than Facebook likes, but whatever works for you) you collect a tiny amount of money. The money in this case is a cryptocurrency (aka digital money) called Steem that is tied to the site.

10 second review: Amateurs. The place is crawling with amateurs. Some of the posts are interesting but kind of rough. A lot of them are just garbage. A few are really good.

There are categories of content. Since I found one called “Poetry” I read some of the poems. Until today (a week after I started), I never upvoted one. That’s not because I’m stingy with upvotes but because, when it comes to poetry, I’m hard to please. I want to see some ability with words (which also means adequate editing. Multiple typos and wrong word choices spoil it for me), some creativty and an interesting point of view. Subject matter that doesn’t bore me to death is also nice. In general, teen angst or just another screed about the inevitable rage-filled ending of another affair, leave me cold.

Still, I found something decent on there and voted for it. Also, putting my money where my mouth is, I posted some of my own poetry (here and here). So far, no one has expressed any interest in it. I plan to keep uploading one or two a week for a few months, to see if I can develop an audience, or pick up some interesting comments. That’s not to be confused with the usual comments which usually run something like, “Not right for our magazine at this time” or “You wrote this on purpose?”

Sometimes I worry that the majority of the poets I know seem disinterested in new technology and the things it can do to help spread the love of poetry. There’s often discussion of outreach and it’s all good. Giving out free samples to people you meet, going to readings, talking to school children, are all fine things. But we have an entire generation of people for whom nothing exists if they can’t see it on their phone. Maybe we should try something new.

Or maybe not. Maybe nothing will come of it. We’ll see.

Writing Software for the Frustrated

As a working (for now) programmer, I often find myself wishing that the software I use when I write stories and poems was as useful to me as the programmer’s text editors and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) I use at my day job. A programmer’s editor organizes files into projects, warns you if your syntax is bad, remembers the names of variables, autocompletes commands so you don’t have to type as much and will even run your tests for you without being told.

The software I use when I’m writing … does all those things because I tend to use my programmer’s text editor to do my other work too. But those features do not lend anything to prose or poetry because normal English is not a programming language. But I still want the features to be useful!

Let’s talk about one of my favorite features: Syntax highlighting.