Dean Wesley Smith noted the other day that a writer who commits to 1,000 words a day will generate 365,000 words, enough to compose nine 40,000-word novels in a year, which led me to my old Doc Savage style fantasies again. When I was young, I thought about emulating Lester Dent, the main force behind “Kenneth Robeson” who wrote a Doc Savage novel every month from 1933 to 1949. Dent served as Robeson for 159 of those novels, or about 10 a year, for 16 years.
And what would I write with my thousand words a day? I certainly would finish my Jeep Thompson adventures at last, but unless I commit to a monthly Jeep Thompson novel, I would need other stories.
Should I start by writing one novel — or finishing an old novel — in November, in honor of the apparently now-defunct National Novel Writing Month organization?
Or should I follow my beloved Ray Bradbury, who wrote a short story every week for most of his life? (Why does 52 short stories in a year sound more doable than nine or ten novels??)
Why am I writing about writing when I could be writing?
There was this blank who blanked in a blank, and life was lovely, or perhaps a little unsettled but manageable, when something truly upsetting upset the apple cart.
That seems like a good start. All I have to do is fill in the blanks and away we go.
Of course, just as I’m leaning into the novel, I inevitably get the urge to pick up my guitar and work on music.
If I wrote a song every day for a year, I would have 365 songs — enough for 26 14-song albums, or five more than I have produced in my entire life to date.
Of course, Theodore Sturgeon opined that 90 percent of everything is crap, but even if that’s true, I would still have 36 and a half decent songs to share.
And why am I writing about writing when I could be writing?
Could all of this indecision be a side effect of 50 years watching other people live their lives and writing what I saw? As a career reporter, I’m so used to watching that maybe I’m not sure how to live.
All of these thoughts, of course, spring from my daily journaling, which ostensibly should serve as a warm-up exercise to the actual writing that occurs after I finish. What happens most days, unfortunately or not, is that I get a blog post or two or three out of the session and the writing of fiction waits for another day. And so I fill in the blanks as follows:
There was this retired writer-editor who envisioned a life as an author and singer-songwriter, and life was lovely until one day he saw that he was only dabbling at the edges of his dream. Will he take the chance of doing what he always believed he wanted to do with the rest of his life? Or would he find an entirely new vision as he went along?
