Patrick Alan

Merry Christmas! As you can see, Tom has a brand new box to climb on. Clearly, that’s why we got it.

It was a nice thought that I would get some writing in. A little crazy, but a nice thought. Clearly, I had fooled myself. Hopefully you did not fall for my ruse.

November and December are vacation months for me. From everything, if I can manage it. Usually, I can’t. This isn’t to say that I won’t be doing any writing between now and the end of the year, but I am going to miss my goal of finishing a novel this year.

Sadly I seem to be on the path of those writers who tell the story, “Well, it took me eight years to write my first book. Then…”

I have been in the range of 30K-50K words per year for the last 5 years. Some of that is estimated because I haven’t always tracked word count. Now I track time spent at the keyboard and words written. It’s much easier to understand that way. My current novel is now midway through the third year of writing it. I will finish it in 2010. I have to.

The sad part is that I know writing a page a day is 80k words per year. I’ve known that for five years. Of course, I have also known that 30 minutes a day of exercise is really good for me, too. I enjoy both exercise and writing, yet still run into problems getting them both done on a consistent basis.

I may get some more writing done between now and the end of the year. Either way I’m still going to end up in my annual wordcount range.

Off to do some last Christmas shopping.

I’m DONE! I am done working for the year. Next year I might take all of December off.

And so it presents me with an opportunity – to write.

As of today, I am a fulltime writer for 3 weeks.

Of course, there are distractions. The first week will be the best, somewhat. Monday I am going on a fieldtrip with Oliver’s school, but Tuesday through Friday, I am home. Sure I have to do things like cleaning, Christmas preparations, lose weight, get in shape, and buy a pool — but who doesn’t have that. I am home by myself. Melissa and Oliver still have school next week.

The second and third week will likely be more challenging to write as Melissa and Oliver will be home and then we have house guests coming for a week. My brother and his family will be staying with me. No worries. I have a pretty big house.

I’ve been off the writing trip for quite some time now. It’s sad and made up of pathetic excuses. This is supposed to kickstart me again. I’d like to end this year with a respectable amount of words for the year. It won’t be, but still… I think two novels per year is respectable… For me, I’d just like to end well.

I was thinking of setting a daily wordcount. I might do that. I’m also thinking of just trying to maximize a wordcount one day – or two. My maximum is around 3500 words in a day. I’m pretty sure I can beat that.

And so it goes. I am a fulltime writer today.

Now, I’m off to exercise and go to a Holiday Parade.

If there’s one thing I excel at, it is procrastination and obsessive video gaming. Ok, the TWO things that I am really good at…

I realize that this blog is just another thing that I am using to procrastinate, too. Shush you!

Yea, I was recently enticed onto Facebook for the express purpose of looking at my friend’s baby photos. Now I can’t get enough of sucker punching people in Mafia Wars. Seriously. I could do that all day. Randomly find and sucker punch people. If I am going to be a crime lord, you have to keep them guessing with your level of sanity. I’m even thinking of sucker punching my own mafia. I’m just that crazy.

And then my mother in law started me on Mah Jongg Dimensions on the AARP site. That is just challenging enough that I can’t win every time and so I have to keep playing.

There are so many other things I should be doing, but I am not doing them. Because I have procrastimustplayvideogameitis. Yes, it’s an inflamation and therefore an ‘itis’.

Anyway, I know I am going to start writing soon. I have come so close to starting these past few days, but 1 game of Mah Jongg and a few sucker punches and I am suddenly distracted. Soon I’ll be back on the write everyday bandwagon using the timed writing method. 1 hour or 1 thousand words, which ever comes second. That works really well for me. Soon I’ll start the clock and get to writing. I have a book to finish this year. Still aiming for this year. Starting the 12th I can begin the full-time writer experiment again – at least for a week leading into the holidays, if not all the way through the Holidays.

What’s your weakness?