In terms of sheer word count, this week was a blight with a net gain of five hundred words. Less than a stellar report card, I admit. Revisions figured largely into this shortfall. I sliced several chapters to the quick, and extricated a few points destined for loose end ville. A reduction in content deeply impacted the net word count.

Also, a paucity of time available for writing meant less writing overall. Preparing for an interview consumed one day, the actual interview and necessary follow-up, another.

Still, ultimately the failure is mine alone. Yuck. I hate writing that, but it is truth, and truth hurts. What I can state is that my efforts bettered what lies on the page, even if there are fewer new pages than I like.

Next week I’ll try harder.

Already the word count meter has benefits. It raised my awareness of where I stand on the manuscript.

Out of nowhere, Buddhapuss Books experienced a nice bump in orders this weekend. Yah! Just finished packing, before a jaunt to the post office.

Work on the book formerly known as Velocity continues in a blind, almost fury like pace. Each day I sit down, write, and rise in the afternoon to find lots of new words on the page.

My output varies daily, and though I remain short of the 2,000 words a day Stephen King espouses, many times I graze the 1,000 a day he suggests for novices. Alas, though, it is not much more than 1,000.

The manuscript is roughly 66,000 words, and there’s lots of story left to tell. Since I’m dead serious about the 100,000 benchmark, I stand at the cusp of the 2/3 of the way there point. Slicing and dicing during the revision process will push the book slightly over or below the target.

I’m curious to see what autumn, and its cooler temperatures, does for my output levels. The last heat blast certainly slackened my pace. I believe surroundings can influence the creative process. For instance, it’s hard to write near a jackhammer grinding asphalt. Conversely, when the weather is comfortable, my synapses fire more effectively and I generally work faster. Or so it seems.

Around the campfire in Delaware last weekend, I read On Writing by Stephen King, and it spurned an epiphany about the craft. The first one hundred pages of the book is a memoir, the remainder deals with the business of writing. My focus here is a response to the first hundred pages. I’ll comment on the second part of the book later.

Stephen King sipped, popped and snorted his poisons of choice for the first half of his writing career. Unlike many rock stars, and he is/was a rock star in the writing world, his dependencies did not obstruct his success, or slow his output. He shipped far more books stoned than he ever did clean. Actually, his ‘slump’ in sales since sobriety could be yet another blog. Today my focus is more on the role of family and the writing process, and why they matter so much.

See, that the publisher tolerated his indulgences is not surprising. At the level he plays at, shipping three major works ( or more ) a year, with the expectation of bestseller status for all of them, is a license to print money. Brand equity matters in books, like it does in every other business, and he had more than most anyone. Stephen King equaled guaranteed massive sales. So long as he continued production, the publisher shipped what he submitted. No one dared tell him to quit, besides his family.

For me, the greatest lesson of the first half of the book: family is what keeps a writer in check, and where necessary, sends a life line. He is lavish with praise for Tabitha King, and the intervention she led that began his journey back to sobriety.

Stephen King is smart enough to appreciate all he really has. Forty million bucks a year does not mean much if your wife boots your junkie ass from the house. It may have taken him a few years to grasp that, but he understands this now.

And so do I. Here’s a public thank you to the Wife for her patience, faith and support. Whatever levels I reach, it’s all cause of you. 😉

What the most effective amount of writing per day might be is a question that bothered me for the last three years. Too much focus on page count and the work seems forced and needs heavy, if not complete, revisions. Too few pages and the manuscript takes forever.

As for the first method – maybe revisions aren’t so bad, and are a necessary part of the process, but top down rewrites really goad. For me, that’s a surefire route to frustration. If a manuscript is written with the intent that ninety percent is bound for the ashcan anyway, why bother? I never liked redoing work because my boss agreed to something stupid or broke something that worked; I’d rather not spin my wheels by my own design.

Enter the opposite argument, a more exacting, and in my opinion, maintainable level of production. Since October 2004 that’s the method used for the book formerly known as Velocity. After dealing with endless revisions on the Ridge Runner, I realized there was little hope for improvements in my present state of mind, so I started from scratch on a new project. With the Ridge Runner no longer a weight, I focused on less on output, more on quality. That meant reading a chapter out loud ten to twenty times, revising it on each pass until the biggest problem was a dropped word or misspelling.

Basically, I drop a word or two on every page, it’s very difficult for me to catch, and less so for a fresh pair of eyes. Therefore I assume I drop words, catch what I can and let Editor person beat up the holdouts. And as for spelling, auto correct is far from infallible. By thy way, the chapter reviews doesn’t include all the in place edits. Once new content reaches the page mark, it’s open season.

OK, so now there is one true draft, and it reads better from the word go, but that brings me to another problem, which is the drastic falloff in output. Even writing six days out of seven, the weekly page count seems pathetic. It’s been bugging me a lot lately, as I near the one year mark of working this way.

While reading Chris Moore’s most recent blog entry, at last I found comfort. He mentions that his output averages five hundred words a day, or less than one and one-half pages. So a manuscript takes him a year and change. Or maybe longer, but let’s say a year. He’s worked this way for each of his nine books for the last fourteen years. I can live with that level of productivity. If a writing life is thirty to fifty years, at that rate that means twenty to thirty books. Not too shabby. Not to shabby at all.