Finished another story, which is good. It took me almost exactly 4 weeks to write 3,500 words, which is bad. Pathetic actually. That’s about 125 words per day. And it had one less revision than normal since I sent it out before my editor-in-chief has read it yet. Worse yet? That was last Thursday and I haven’t started my next story yet and probably won’t until at least next Tuesday.

It is so hard to find time to do it, especially when we are so busy all the time. I read blogs of professional writers and they usually write roughly 2,500 words per day, so about 20 times my recent word count. It is especially discouraging when I think about working on the novel I have in mind. At my current rate it would take me roughly 640 days to bang that out, or just under 2 years. The pros usually strive for maybe 2 novels a year, plus short stories published in between. Of course they may or may not work a full time job and they may or may not have a family including a small child, but that is small consolation.

On the plus side, I think that my writing has definitely improved already. Especially in my most recent story, I feel like I learned a lot about how to handle dialog. So that is a good feeling. What I’m really lacking the most right now is a couple of readers who aren’t afraid to rip me up, so I can improve. I do want to join a workshop of some sort, but I don’t know if I can make that time commitment when my writing time is already so precious. My current plan is to joining Critters when my inventory is built up enough to make it worth my while. I also have a couple of people that I wouldn’t mind asking to be first line editors but I will probably wait for a while until either A) I make my first sale and this whole thing comes to light, or B) it becomes obvious that I won’t make my first sale until I get some good criticism.

Oh well, I have 4 stories out to market and that’s 4 more than I had 3 months ago!