Weekly Word Count –August 8th through August 14th 2011

**NOTE: Sorry for the delay on last week's Weekly Word Count. I had it written, just forgot to post it (along with several other blog posts last week) so today you are getting 2 for 1!**

Week 2 of being free from my day job has been a bit of a transition.  A simple post on Facebook asking for freelance assignments generated a lot of help from my friends, acquaintances and former students. They forwarded job postings, leads on good companies to consider, and even a couple of possible future assignments.  All this being said, I am disappointed with my output again last week: a mere 2,754 words. 

My best day was Friday with 1,579 words, 1,205 of which were a white paper draft for a client.  I wrote no new content for the blogs last week, only tweaked a couple of articles that were already waiting to be posted.  Another 329 words were devoted to my “business plan” which is more of an all-encompassing task list of the things I need to do to make this writing biz happen. This is good for helping me think on paper about all of the things that need to be done and roughly in what order.  The rest of the words were strictly job search related. In other words, very little creative output at all.  The days sort of blended together with my mood swerving from cool confidence to stomach sinking panic. Depending on the day and the content of my email inbox.

I realized that I still have a lot of things to do. I needed to gather writing samples from all of my recent writing projects for an online portfolio, which has become a bit of a problem since some of my writing samples were still on 3.5” diskettes, and none of the three old computers I had with floppy drives were functioning. Enter eBay and $12.99 for a new USB floppy drive delivered on Monday, and I was sifting through a massive data jungle filled with my obsessive need to back up everything repeatedly, but never seeming to overwrite older files.  I’ve now located a couple of dozen files which might serve as possible writing samples. I’m trying to gather a variety of different documents to show off the scope of my writing talent.

I also needed to install WordPress onto my primary website which was challenging to sift through all of the data transfer and behind the scenes set up with the web hosting service, but it is done, Now all I have to do is configure and launch it when I’m ready. Which will hopefully be next week.

Then over the weekend I forced myself to get out of my office and head down to the local coffee shop for our monthly writers group meeting and spent the rest of the weekend with family… So two of my (traditionally) most productive days were completely empty of words which also dragged the count down.

I don’t know what this really says about me or my situation other than reinforcing that there is NEVER a perfect time to write. Even if you have a lot of time, life tends to find ways to seep into it and leach a little of it away.

This week is a new week and there is a lot planned for it, so I’m definitely going to need to manage it well and get stuff done whenever I can.