Musings on my word-count goal
In the weeks between the announcement that the site would close and the actual date of the close, I was trying to write 1000 words a day, and generally managed it.

Once I actually was a full-time writer, though, I tried to bump that up to 2000 words a day.  That hasn't worked at all.

I'm a bit sad at the idea that I don't seem to be able to be more productive as a full-time writer than I was while also holding down a day job.

Now, I didn't expect my output to scale linearly.  (I was probably writing for about 2 hours most evenings during that period and I certainly didn't expect that I'd be able to write 4 or 5 times as much just because I'd have 8 more hours that I could write in.)  But I did expect to be able to write some more  My experience so far is that I can't.

Since that seemed at least a little odd, I pondered a bit over how I might do some kind of cross-check, and then I remember that there was one other period when I was writing more-or-less full time:  the six weeks I was at Clarion.  Looking back at my Clarion journal, I found that I didn't note down daily word counts regularly enough to do any statistics on those numbers, but I do have the word-counts of the stories that I finished.  I turned in stories totaling 24,550 words, which works out to 585 words a day.  Of course, that's word counts for polished drafts.  When I adjust for words written that didn't make it into finished drafts, plus a few days of writing after I turned in my final story, I probably was averaging something in the ballpark of 1000 words of rough draft per day.

Now, I was doing other stuff at Clarion--reading and critiquing my classmate's stories, plus class work.  But then, I'm doing other stuff now, too--in particular, the writing for Wise Bread.

Anyway, I feel a bit better now.  I'll mentally down-shift a bit and go back to targeting 1000 words of fiction a day.  It won't make any difference in how much I'm getting written, and maybe I'll be happier about it.  I ought to figure out how much I've written for Wise Bread.

(Actually, a quick check was very easy.  In my folder of rough drafts of Wise Bread articles, I've got 66,237 words of prose.  Dividing by the days since mid-July that comes to something under 400 words a day.)