Read, write, revise, repeat. This is my life.

In case you didn’t get the memo I dropped on my Facebook page, I’ve been writing an average of 5,000 words a day, and reading just shy of 200 pages each evening. I wish I could tell you how much revision work I’m doing, but by the time I get around to that, I’m a drooling wreck of a man with barely enough functioning brain cells to work a red pen.

This Site

Posting continues. I’m especially happy with the post I put up Friday. It was fun to write, the writing isn’t terrible, and it’s much closer to the sort of stuff I want to write all the time.

Freelancing

I have six articles for sale on The Site That Shall Not Be Named, and six more sitting on my hard drive in various stages of completeness. The experiment is ongoing. I’m playing with pricing, word counts, subject matter, presentation, and anything else I can think of to increase my odds of making sales.

Then there’s Yahoo! Voices, for which I have four stories half-ready to go; straight, first-person humor pieces. I need to throw a coat of polish on three of them, and gut the fourth, but it’s still progress.

This is where a normal person celebrates; I’m getting it done, getting it out, and getting on to the next thing. Instead of that, I’m looking at what I haven’t been able to touch: learning how to query places, finding more places to query, and getting a handle on how I want to approach the topics I want to write about.

Sooner or later, you have to stick a fork in the research, call it done, and get something out there. I know that. Trouble is, I haven’t even caught up to sooner yet.

If I had to guess, I’m staring down two days of dawn to dusk research and note-taking. If I keep trying to just fit it in like I have been, two days turns into two weeks.

It’s early, I haven’t had a lot of coffee, but I think you can see where I’m going.

Taking two days off from writing will send me into a mad spiral of self-loathing, my better angels drowned out by the screams of my deprecating demons. It’s just how I roll.

That said, it’s worth it, and I know it.

Two solid days gets me sending queries two weeks earlier than what I’m doing now. It’s giving up ground to take it, and the demons’ll just have to shut up about it.