Another thing that I find myself obsessing over is word count. Need to get this many words down today, or I can put down half as many today and just double up tomorrow…or I can take arrest day and just try to regain lost ground over the course of the week.

Whoever said writing was relaxing was never an obsessive sort of person.

This went hand in hand with the whole deadline thing. I would be more concerned about the numbers than the words. Granted – the sayings: you can’t edit a blank page and everyone’s first copy sucks are drilled into my head, but there is to be said for trying to put quality over quantity. With that in mind, I am going to not completely disregard daily word counts, but I am going to try to not lose sleep over it.

I may have said this before, but I feel I need to repeat it to myself as a way of giving myself permission to do this. Like I said earlier, I have an obsessive personality, and sometimes it latches onto the wrong things. I read several articles that I need to pump out 2,000 words a day. This was told to me in a roundabout way by people whose only job was to pump out 2,000 words a day. At that time, I was working a full-time job and freshly married, so I felt I had to give my blushing bride some time, so when I didn’t hit that 2,000 word count, I felt bad, and it led to depression and no writing. You can see the problem I ran into.

So – for people reading this and thinking that they can’t get two thousand words a day: DON’T WORRY. Get some words on paper. You got two words down after an hour? Congrats! You did three thousand in three hours and still feel like you can churn out a few thousand more? Great! As long as you’re making some sort of progress, you’re doing better than that person sitting and watching TV and silently complaining that he has no time to write.

Me? I’m now doing about 600 words a day mostly in the evenings, but I am being constant about it, and if I miss a day, I just need to get back on that horse and keep going. No doubling word count or other Devil’s Arithmetic (if you ask me, all arithmetic comes from the Devil, said the ‘D’ student in math). I miss it, I miss it, I just have to keep on going.

Just keep going.