I love the writing, but I have no job, no paycheck, and I’ve apparently waited for the economy to hit rock bottom before realizing that I should probably get back to work. It’s tough to go from a good paying career in sales to earning nil.

What the hell, I’m neck deep already. I’m on my 4th draft and the story is looking better, even I’m still not anywhere close to subbing it out. Maybe by the time it’s ready to sell, the market will have rebounded and I’ll have a second book in progress.

I wish my new word count was higher, but that would detract from the revisions, and the crits on OWW.

It is motivating to hear what all of you are able to accomplish. Time to push a little harder and get more done.

Back to writing…

To which I say, ‘Hmmm. Let’s see, I get up in the morning and check my e-mail, then write a little bit. I go to work and sit in front of a computer all day writing. I go home, have supper and a bit of a soak in the tub, work on the current book until I’m nearly asleep, then read a page or two of whatever it is I’m reading until I can’t keep my eyes open any more. (Oh, and surf the web more than I should.) Yep, that’s REAL romantic!’

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining! My life suits me well just the way it is. But ROMANTIC? Not hardly, not in ANY sense of the word!

“Hi, my name is Kelly and I’m…a writer,” he says.

“Hello Kelly!” comes the chorus back.

Yeah, right there with you. Though I am in the lucky position of being a kept man as my primary day job and thus responsible for all the life support functions in our household, it’s surprising how much I don’t get done that I should because I’m writing. Two books a year for the last three years and hoping to push it to three in ’09.

But you know, my students never want to know how much i write or have written. Isn’t that funny? And I don’t tend to volunteer it.

This year I’m actually going to put out about 250K of fiction or more. Wow. That’s huge. No wonder I’m tired.

My usual monthly output is more around 15,000 words. Strangely, in the times I’ve been able to write full-time, my output really didn’t seem to go up all that significantly…

I don’t have another job–I write full time, which is a misnomer in and of itself–but even without a day job it astonishes me how much of my *life* is about writing. I’m trying really hard to change that: there is not, for example, any actual *need* for me to write 400,000 words this year (or the even more imposing 500K which was briefly bandied about, because it would bring my words written in the last 6 years up to a nice round two millions). The competitive/salesman part of my mind thinks that if there’s another month in the year, I should write another 30 or 50,000 words (despite having written 350K and despite actually facing what can nominally be called a lull in my schedule).

It’s *completely* OC. And it’s very visible to me the things I don’t do if I’m so focused on writing–going to the gym, pursuing photography, taking yoga classes–doing, well, *anything* that isn’t writing, in fact.

This cannot be healthy. It’s possible that for the first time in my life my new year’s resolution is going to be to write *less*. Keeping to my contracts and *living* a little more has *got* to be a better way to go about it….