For the last year, I have written every day.
For most of that time, I was tracking wordcount on the Magic Spreadsheet. For the last few months, I’ve stopped using the Magic Spreadsheet, but have been tracking my word counts on my own Google spreadsheet.
For the last two days, I did not write.
It felt very strange not to be getting in word count for those two days, but it also felt kind of awesome. I was feeling very, very burned out, and just generally exhausted. It’s the end of school holidays, and I’ve been sick on and off for months, and the cold weather has not been fun to the arthritis and fibromyalgia.
And so, on Saturday and Sunday, I did not write. And I’m thinking that I might go back to only writing on weekdays. Treating writing as a “real” job again.
This year has actually been a really useful experiment for me. I’ve proved that I can write every day if I need to (though probably not indefinitely). In this time, I’ve managed a draft and a half of a novel, two short stories that have been sold, and a novella that I’ve sent out. Those two short stories were actually really hard to write and took a long time (as short works tend to for me, I’m slowly accepting the fact that I’m a slow writer in terms of getting stuff to the finished stage).
But should I keep doing it just because I can? I don’t think so. At some point, I may come back to it, and I will probably end up writing some weekends, but for now, I need some time off.
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