SOUL OF SWORDS update and solid writing advice

Today was both Earth Day and Vladimir Lenin’s birthday, and I celebrated both these august occasions in my preferred fashion, by eating meat and engaging in private enterprise for profit.

Also, I worked on SOUL OF SWORDS. This post at The Kill Zone has quite a lot of good advice about writing. Key quote:

 I am often asked what the single best piece of writing advice I ever got was, and I always say, Write to a quota. I write six days a week, and take Sundays off. It’s worked for me for over twenty years. Virtually no one can write 5,000 words a day like Gardner. And of course most writers have day jobs and family responsibilities. So the key is to figure out what you can produce and commit to doing that week in and week out.

This is my standard suggestion: Figure out what you can comfortably write per week, given your particular circumstances. It doesn’t matter the number, just find it. Then up that by 10% and divide into six days. Make that your goal. Keep a record on a spreadsheet that tracks your daily writing and turns it into weekly totals. It will give you confidence to see those numbers adding up throughout the year.

Be prepared to give some things up (TV is a jealous mistress, too) in order to find time to write.

I can appreciate that, because as of today I have officially been working on the rough draft of SOUL OF SWORDS for thirty days, and in that time I’ve written 104,000 words (and that was with missing three days for a holiday). In the old days, pulp writers would write to fill the pages of a magazine. In this new era, we pulp writers write to fill the memory of your ereader or tablet – and they can hold a lot of books.

Needless to say, I don’t watch much TV. But there’s hardly anything good on anyway. 🙂

-JM