I wrote ten thousand words today (in addition to this post) to see if I could. Early afternoon is indeed the very worst time of the day to write. Cranky, falling behind the thousand-words-per-hour pace I set and audibly cursing the distractions who think open exhaust expresses one’s individuality, I cut loose and managed to finish. For this reason I can’t really post the thing without offending a lot of people (and losing others with the long, circling, unreadable bits). South Park has already addressed the v-twin subject better than I could in that one expletive-rich paragraph. But I did it. I wrote a gen-u-wine ten thousand words in a single day, in about nine and a quarter hours, mostly on the subject of writing ten thousand words in a single day. A myriad of words, ten thousand, from the Greek. One hundred squared, which if you think about it would make a very challenging multiplication table. For the first time I think I can say I have a favorite number.

My nanowrimo experience was a bust. I wrote the fifty thousand but they weren’t of-a-single-thing so I don’t intend on claiming it. November was a regular month, writing-wise. Since then I’ve been skipping days entirely and being a slug, doing research. So I figured what I might need is a complete day without the internet but not away from the computer. I’ve tried to do this a couple times before and never got more than a few thousand words into it. My goal was to begin typing words into the typey-type and see if it was possible to spend absolutely all day typing stuff from my head without censoring much or editing. It is. Possible. Just. With coffee and ibuprofen. At around two in the afternoon my brain stopped working but I soldiered on while I set some food going. As mentioned above there was a moment when I imagined pouring gasoline on and lighting up every member of the open-exhaust-hipster Mafia. After this late lunch I regained sanity and spent most of the afternoon catching up. The final thousand words flew by in about 38 minutes.

I’m tempted to enter it into Mur Lafferty’s Magic Spreadsheet. Plus this post, of course, whatever it ends up being.

For the future I need to slow the rate. To consistently better one hundred words every six minutes it is necessary to abandon a thread of writing the moment it gets complicated enough to sit and think about. That’s not very satisfying and it doesn’t really advance the long-term cause. But it broke my tendency to distraction.