Day 69 – I Am the Walrus

I used to read George Orwell’s blog. Actually, not a blog per se (in case you didn’t guess) but a posting of his journal entries from exactly 70 years ago. Right now, he’s writing about the London bombing (and, unfortunately, his latest post has a bit of a racist slant…)

In any case, some of his journal entries are long and rich with content. Others, when he didn’t have much to say, would simply recount the number of eggs that the chickens gave him that morning. “One egg.” That would be an entire entry for that day. Regular readers would get such a kick out of it too, like it was an inside joke or something.

(Check out the “blog” here: http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/)

How is this relevant to anything? I feel compelled to write something when I’m recording my totals for the day. But I’m finding that I’m repeating myself needlessly in some of these posts. That can’t be fun reading for anyone out there; it’s certainly getting tiresome to write it. Lately, I’ve just not entered my totals to avoid the whole mess. That’s not working for me either, since I really do want to record word count, hours, etc. as I go.

So today I hit upon my compromise. When I record and have nothing really important to say, I’m just going to “one egg” it. I hope you like this compromise too.

BTW, also broke 70,000 yesterday! Someone asked me what word count I’m shooting for: none, really. For this first draft, I’ll stop when I stop. A lot of it won’t be in the final version, and what does stay will probably need trimmed. I have to research what the “optimal” word count is before a I start the second draft, and shoot for that. (If writing for 15+ years has taught me anything, it’s how to write to a specific word count…)

~Graham

(Novel Writing Totals)

Hours Today: 1
Words Today: 1,193
Hours Total: 52.50
Words Total: 70,276