Did I mention that I have been writing 1000 words a day for the last month or so? I have. With moderate success (if by moderate you understand that the middle ground between super great and unbelievably horrible is just that).
Actually, I have been tremendously successful at the actual writing of 1000 or more words every day. I've only missed one night since I committed to the daily activity. Ass in chair, blah blah blah. This does not mean that I have been writing 1000 GOOD words or strings of words each day. But whatever, it's a start.
The very first day of writing these grand or so words, I wrote something to read at my writing group, about the process of committing to the page and all the shit that floats up for writers sitting down to write. Well, all the stuff that floats up for ME sitting down to write, anyway. Not surprisingly (because apparently we writers are nothing if not unoriginal in all the shit that floats up around the process, the act, the desire, the actuating, the ass-sitting, etc etc), it was some pretty familiar stuff for my fellow wordsmitheons: I got plenty of positive feedback, and a lot of head-nodding and amens around the table.
Afterward, a gal that I particularly like (the instigator of the nerdy ladies board game fun) grabbed my paper and a red pen and bracketed six or seven sentences or segments that she felt particularly stood out. Right on. When I got home and did the casual math, I was running about 10% good, stand out stuff, to the remaining 90% comme ci comme ca stuff. Honestly, I'm fine with that. And if 10,000 monkeys pounding on 10,000 keyboards will come up with Hamlet in 10,000 years (um, isn't that how that goes?) then surely one girl, at one keyboard, in 10,000 nights can come up with something usable in 10% of all that scattertyped text, right?
So here's the problem: Procastination. It's insane to me how very much I resist the task at hand. I can sit in this fercockt (probably not the correct yiddish spelling of this, my favorite Grandpa word) chair all night long, and read all y'alls blogs like 18 times over, ignoring my real-life to-do-lists and the blank page in front of me, read read read and catch up on CNN and Buzzflash, and write a few words, and head over to Facebook for some Scramble and some spying on my friends and family, and then tap out a few more words, and then go scare the crap out of myself with stuff about the environment and warming and the war and the conspiracies (oy fucking vey, the conspiracies of those that are conspiring and not yet geting caught, holy hell) and the sea of plastic in the Pacific and the damage done and doing and gonna do, and then go write a few more bits (in a decidedly lower tone) and then back all y'alls blogs, and then internet-stalk people like Julia Kernochan from Junior High (she's a Yale-educated lawyer on Senator Schumer's team, if you must know) and back to Buzzflash and on and on and on. (I can imagine one or more of you sitting there with your wee one in your lap as you try to read my overly long post here, in the few spare moments you have to catchup on web bizness, thinking that clearly I need a child in order to stop having infinite time to not focus on the thing that I sat down to accomplish, right? Right. Sorry.)
My ultimate point here, however, is not about my fierce and ridiculous need and ability to procrastinate, but rather to talk about my latest good time in the avoidance realm. Bex treated me to a lovely procrasty show of her own (oh Veronica, oh Logan, how I miss you so) and then I thought about how much I feel that her blog is written just for me (by the way, writers are apparently giant narcissists, so look out) and then I started thinking about what others might think in stopping by her site and then I thought "hey I wish there was a way to find out who was visiting a site, that would be funny" and then I immediately recovered my brain and remembered the miracle thing known as Google Analytics.
I signed up with the old Analytics tool back when I created this little vanity project. And I couldn't figure out if I'd inserted the tracking code correctly (it did not seem as though I had), got super annoyed and then gave up on the effort (shocking, I know). I've not logged in since that day. But hey man, what a perfect procrastination tool!
And indeed it was a sweet little surprise treasure trove of goodness. So much information! More than you could ever need/want/take in/make use of in a million years. But lots of helpful bits and bytes and bites. Here, my friends, is the tastiest morsel:
The top ten (er, eleven) searched keywords/phrases that have led people to This (Amberican) Life this week-
11) anna beth chao.
10) Important stuff to know in life.
9) I'm going to ride my bicycles and roller skates.
8) 3 month old drool.
7) momby porn. (that is not a typo. momBy porn. someone should really spellcheck their blog, am I right?)
6) Sun chips flying pig. (nice)
5) scurvy more tests and diagnosis. (wow, sorry dude, that sucks)
4) Chastity-belt. (hahahahahahaha)
3) sucktastic. (um, ha).
2) 1950's aprons.
1) momboob. *
God I loves me some interwebs, I really do.
And guess what? 947 words, suckers, yeah!
But now I need to wrap it up and go watch last week's BSG cause apparently the 5th Cylon is revealed and it's bugging me that I've gone this long without seeing it but Josh grabbed a crap copy and then he grabbed a super nice, super huge copy that wouldn't play on the computer we've got hooked up to the projector (have you heard the expression "the cobbler's wife wears no shoes?") and then the final copy was just right, but Sunday I babysat* and Monday I procrastinated too long into the evening to allow for viewing and now tonight I'm coming dangerously close to same. So au revoir, mon amies. I hope you enjoyed this last segment of rambling smack wherein I tried to up my word count to make up for all the numericals above, which really shouldn't count toward the sum word total, don't you agree?
1097 give or take.
It counts.
*As it's related to the otherwise baffling search term "momboob" and the aforementioned babysitting, this might be a convenient time to tell you about a mortifying thing that happened while babysitting the wee Watsons on Sunday. Except I just wrote it and it's a million miles long, so I'll make it a separate post, backdated, and thus appearing below. Enjoy.
Actually, I have been tremendously successful at the actual writing of 1000 or more words every day. I've only missed one night since I committed to the daily activity. Ass in chair, blah blah blah. This does not mean that I have been writing 1000 GOOD words or strings of words each day. But whatever, it's a start.
The very first day of writing these grand or so words, I wrote something to read at my writing group, about the process of committing to the page and all the shit that floats up for writers sitting down to write. Well, all the stuff that floats up for ME sitting down to write, anyway. Not surprisingly (because apparently we writers are nothing if not unoriginal in all the shit that floats up around the process, the act, the desire, the actuating, the ass-sitting, etc etc), it was some pretty familiar stuff for my fellow wordsmitheons: I got plenty of positive feedback, and a lot of head-nodding and amens around the table.
Afterward, a gal that I particularly like (the instigator of the nerdy ladies board game fun) grabbed my paper and a red pen and bracketed six or seven sentences or segments that she felt particularly stood out. Right on. When I got home and did the casual math, I was running about 10% good, stand out stuff, to the remaining 90% comme ci comme ca stuff. Honestly, I'm fine with that. And if 10,000 monkeys pounding on 10,000 keyboards will come up with Hamlet in 10,000 years (um, isn't that how that goes?) then surely one girl, at one keyboard, in 10,000 nights can come up with something usable in 10% of all that scattertyped text, right?
So here's the problem: Procastination. It's insane to me how very much I resist the task at hand. I can sit in this fercockt (probably not the correct yiddish spelling of this, my favorite Grandpa word) chair all night long, and read all y'alls blogs like 18 times over, ignoring my real-life to-do-lists and the blank page in front of me, read read read and catch up on CNN and Buzzflash, and write a few words, and head over to Facebook for some Scramble and some spying on my friends and family, and then tap out a few more words, and then go scare the crap out of myself with stuff about the environment and warming and the war and the conspiracies (oy fucking vey, the conspiracies of those that are conspiring and not yet geting caught, holy hell) and the sea of plastic in the Pacific and the damage done and doing and gonna do, and then go write a few more bits (in a decidedly lower tone) and then back all y'alls blogs, and then internet-stalk people like Julia Kernochan from Junior High (she's a Yale-educated lawyer on Senator Schumer's team, if you must know) and back to Buzzflash and on and on and on. (I can imagine one or more of you sitting there with your wee one in your lap as you try to read my overly long post here, in the few spare moments you have to catchup on web bizness, thinking that clearly I need a child in order to stop having infinite time to not focus on the thing that I sat down to accomplish, right? Right. Sorry.)
My ultimate point here, however, is not about my fierce and ridiculous need and ability to procrastinate, but rather to talk about my latest good time in the avoidance realm. Bex treated me to a lovely procrasty show of her own (oh Veronica, oh Logan, how I miss you so) and then I thought about how much I feel that her blog is written just for me (by the way, writers are apparently giant narcissists, so look out) and then I started thinking about what others might think in stopping by her site and then I thought "hey I wish there was a way to find out who was visiting a site, that would be funny" and then I immediately recovered my brain and remembered the miracle thing known as Google Analytics.
I signed up with the old Analytics tool back when I created this little vanity project. And I couldn't figure out if I'd inserted the tracking code correctly (it did not seem as though I had), got super annoyed and then gave up on the effort (shocking, I know). I've not logged in since that day. But hey man, what a perfect procrastination tool!
And indeed it was a sweet little surprise treasure trove of goodness. So much information! More than you could ever need/want/take in/make use of in a million years. But lots of helpful bits and bytes and bites. Here, my friends, is the tastiest morsel:
The top ten (er, eleven) searched keywords/phrases that have led people to This (Amberican) Life this week-
11) anna beth chao.
10) Important stuff to know in life.
9) I'm going to ride my bicycles and roller skates.
8) 3 month old drool.
7) momby porn. (that is not a typo. momBy porn. someone should really spellcheck their blog, am I right?)
6) Sun chips flying pig. (nice)
5) scurvy more tests and diagnosis. (wow, sorry dude, that sucks)
4) Chastity-belt. (hahahahahahaha)
3) sucktastic. (um, ha).
2) 1950's aprons.
1) momboob. *
God I loves me some interwebs, I really do.
And guess what? 947 words, suckers, yeah!
But now I need to wrap it up and go watch last week's BSG cause apparently the 5th Cylon is revealed and it's bugging me that I've gone this long without seeing it but Josh grabbed a crap copy and then he grabbed a super nice, super huge copy that wouldn't play on the computer we've got hooked up to the projector (have you heard the expression "the cobbler's wife wears no shoes?") and then the final copy was just right, but Sunday I babysat* and Monday I procrastinated too long into the evening to allow for viewing and now tonight I'm coming dangerously close to same. So au revoir, mon amies. I hope you enjoyed this last segment of rambling smack wherein I tried to up my word count to make up for all the numericals above, which really shouldn't count toward the sum word total, don't you agree?
1097 give or take.
It counts.
*As it's related to the otherwise baffling search term "momboob" and the aforementioned babysitting, this might be a convenient time to tell you about a mortifying thing that happened while babysitting the wee Watsons on Sunday. Except I just wrote it and it's a million miles long, so I'll make it a separate post, backdated, and thus appearing below. Enjoy.
1 comment:
Yay for writing 1,000+ words a day!
Analytics is definitely like crack. Especially when you see where your readers are located. It's fun, too, to find out what posts catch a lot of attention.
My biggest hits (as it were):
1) Ren's Tattoo
2) My encounter with LDC (I was linked to a Japanese fan site)
3) Post about the 9th Circuit holding a session at school
But, sadly, I don't get the crazy and fun search terms you get!
And I'm not surprised that the interwebs directs readers searching for "important things to know in life" to you, dollface. Yay! XO
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