They tell me I have to blog because I am a writer, and I want to get published.  So, here I am, “blogging.”  (Yet another noun turned verb that didn’t exist when I was growing up.)    While it seems a means to an end, I can also see the appeal of doing this. It’s a wonderful tool for a natural procrastinator such as myself.  So,  I can come over here and write something, anything, just to say I’ve been writing.  All the while, I can cheerfully ignore the latest piece of crap I should be editing.

I named this blog “1,000 Words A Day” to remind myself that is what I need to do as a basic minimum to achieve my personal writing goals.  Oh, I know that doesn’t sound very artsy.  I know it doesn’t leave much room for my muse to be coy.   If I’m going to be serious about being a published author, I need to have some serious goals and deadlines.  Contests help, but they aren’t always the best motivator for me.  I read once, and I think, it was in Stephen King’s “On-Writing” that  he writes 1,000 words a day.  I know I’m not Stephen King, but I liked the ethic.

I’ve had people ask me about how I write that much every day when I get ‘writer’s block.’   I’ve always bought into the theory there is really no such thing as writer’s block.   Instead, there are simply “something is wrong and you can’t go on until it’s fixed” sort of scenarios.  This is a healthier outlook than calling my muse a dumb-ass or berating the poor thing for poor performance.   I have a multitude of problems to fix in the first novel I ‘finished.’  In fact, there are so many that I decided to toss it on the shelf and let it sit for a long time rather than sit there staring at all the things needing to be fixed and staying stuck on them.  I suppose that the problems could have “blocked” me from doing anything if I had let them.  Maybe knowing when to dig into a problem or tossing it onto a shelf to sit for a bit is the key to getting through a so-called block.

I spent all of November working on NANOWRIMO and poured out more than 50,000 words in a month.  I’ve been working since then on fixing the mess I created.  I wrote willy-nilly.   I wrote any scene  that came to mind whenever I sat down, and now I have a jumbled mess all in MS word.  I could have let that prevent me from going back to that work, but I like the story an awful lot.  I downloaded Liquid Story Binder and am thinking that is the way to go.  Talk about organization!   I’m going to cut and paste from MS word into LSB and see if I can’t wrangle some sense out of a month’s worth of insanity.  The basic story is there, somewhere–now if I can just put the pieces of the puzzle back together.  (If anyone has other suggestions besides Liquid Story Binder as a good writing tool, I’d love to hear them.)

I’m not sure how editing fits into the 1,000 words a day idea.  Maybe I should do the 1,000 first no matter what and then go do the editing work–see, there I go again, anything to put off the hard work.   I now know why so many writer’s never get published.  Writing is easy;  making something worth reading is a different story.  (597 words. Does this count toward my daily total?)