Lately I’ve been writing.
Like, not writing shorter pieces or book reviews or essays, but working on the actual new novel I blogged about researching but not yet starting a few months ago. I’ve been working in larger chunks of 2-4 hours one or two days a week, which is a pretty good rate for me with all the things I have going on. So far in 2021 I’ve set aside six of these writing sessions where I sat down at the computer completely free of distractions and just wrote, which also feels really good.
Now let’s get one thing straight: I’m not the kind of person who usually brags (or blogs) about his writing progress, especially in terms of word count—which is why I’m not posting my word count here. I don’t post my word count because all too often it can come across as bragging—like the number of words someone puts down on the page are an indicator of their self-worth even if all those words suck hard. Other writers can read that and feel discouraged and inferior that they aren’t producing the same number of words—I know because I’ve been there.
I once read an interview with the writer John Banville where he talked about sometimes spending an entire day getting a single sentence exactly the way he wanted it. John Banville writes some pretty beautiful sentences, but the point is that Continue reading
