Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Mandatory Minimums

I get up early each morning to write, and in the last few weeks, I've been writing grudgingly. The bare minimum of words seems to venture forth from my fingers.

That bare minimum has been 400 for years. I set this minimum arbitrarily once upon a time as some measure of success. It's a minimum that holds while I'm also working full-time at another job. When I'm being a full-time writer, the minimum increases to 800, 1500, or sometimes even higher depending on deadlines.

Part of me thinks that if I just upped the minimum in my mind for workdays, I would just write that new minimum. 500 or 600 or whatever. Maybe someday. The problem is, I already set the minimum at 400, so I'm used to it. I know that any new minimum might be fake.

In any case, today I've managed 403 words of marital strife between Leigh and Charlie, the main characters in OVERTIME, my third novel. They're arguing over money and division of labor. Typical stuff. We'll see if I can get some good details in there. Flip things a bit. In any case, every day that chapter gets 400 words longer.

In a little while, I'll go to school and teach the third graders about the election. I'm pretty excited about the lessons I planned, but as we know, even lessons that seem exciting can sometimes fail. I'll hope for the best. I've been doing a lot of that lately.