Weekly Word Count – August 15th through August 21st 2011

I know I sound like a broken record, but this week I have a good excuse for the lack of output.  I built a TREE HOUSE. 

Actually, I didn’t build it, I just helped. My Dad visited for a couple of days and created a plan out of my vague idea of what I wanted for the kids.  The first thing we had to do was “fix-up” phase one of the plan, which was the deck that took me all of last summer to build.  A pretty good effort according to my Dad, who is a certified expert in such things, except for the fact that it needed to be reinforced in order to make it safer.  Then once he figured out all of the angles for the construction so it would have a sloped roof, we constructed the frame of the house. 

So day one of the process consisted of, looking at the deck, figuring out how large the tree house was going to be (5’ by 7’), what design we wanted (doors, windows, type of roof) and then creating a shopping list.

Then it was off to Menard's where we purchased 40 2x4x8’s, 10 sheets of plywood, one roll of roofing material, 3 additional 4x4x8’s to reinforce the deck, some aluminum screen, door hinges and hardware and we were ready to roll.  By noon we had everything that we needed and began construction.

As Dad and I reinforced the deck, the boys unloaded the lumber out of the van.  One the deck was properly reinforced, we began cutting and constructing the sides of the house on the ground.  It is amazing how easy a construction project can be when you have the right tools.  With my dad’s saw and nail gun, the sides were assembled and good to go by 7pm on the first day.

On Day 2, we lifted the walls up onto the deck, clamped them together, nailed them in place and then began cutting the plywood sides for the house. While this was going on, I laid the roof beams in place and settled the plywood for the roof in place. This was completed by lunchtime.

After a quick lunch of Nick’s Pizza and sweet corn from Neely’s farm I worked on nailing the plywood for the room in place while Dad and Ben marked and cut out the door for the house.  Once I had the first part of the roof in place, I was “trapped” on the roof while screwing the entire roof down tight from on top.  While Dad and Leah cut out the windows for the house, I nailed the rolled roofing into place on the roof.  A very hot job.

And by 5pm, all that is left to do is painting and putting the screens for the door and windows in place.  I am amazed what a difference that 2 days can make.

In addition almost another day was sucked up by taking Addie to Cincinnati for an appointment with a specialist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.  Figure in the 2 hour drive each way, the 2 hours for the appointment itself, and then (of course) lunch at a Chinese restaurant afterwards and the day is pretty much shot.

What does this have to do with the Weekly Word Count? Not a lot, other than giving me a tale to tell to pad the word count at the end of the week with some nifty pictures to boot, and a couple of lessons about the project  that can be translated over from the construction realm to writing.  Word Count for the Week: 1,789.

I’m not going to bother breaking it down for you… Next week will be better I promise. Next Week: Lessons I Learned About Writing from Building a Tree House!

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.

Weekly Word Count – August 1st through 7th, 2011

Okay this week's total 4264 words. Probably not as high as I would've liked, but okay considering the circumstances. The first thing to understand is that I lost my job on Monday so I was a bit busy wrapping up my work life at the company I’ve worked at for the last 10 years: Packing up my desk, turning in my laptop, processing paperwork, and saying goodbye to friends and co-workers who have been such a big part of my life for so long. It is hard to process when it happens to you, even if in your heart you believe that this is a good thing.

Courtesy of Ian Aberle via Flickr

Luckily, I have some freelance work lined up and about half of those words written this week were devoted to working on a client project. The rest of the words were for the blogs and a little on updating my LinkedIn profile.

Losing your job is never a good thing but it does force you to make changes, and to be honest I was unhappy there for a very long time. I've always had this dream in the back of my head of making my own living as a freelance writer, and maybe this is the opportunity to do just that. I've been slowly preparing for this day for some time, buying equipment, software, office supplies, and trying to line up clients for possible future business, but it is difficult to work on any freelance projects when you have a full-time job. I'm not sure what the future holds, but I'm optimistic this change will be for the better.

For anyone who has the dream of having enough time to write that novel, that book or that screenplay, I now have it and I plan on exploiting it to the fullest.

This afternoon I have been reorganizing my office and beginning to assemble the research material for my next book: Creative Thinking for Creative Writers. I plan on beginning a draft or an outline by the end of the week. I have to fight through the nervousness and the temptation to spend all my time looking for a new full-time position because I know that this is not what I want, but I need to be realistic, and make sure that secondary parachute is packed and ready to go just in case of emergency.

So if you know of anyone who needs a good freelance writer with lots of technical and business experience, please let me know and stay tuned for more details about the journey. Thank you.

Weekly Word Count: Summary of July 2011

Does anyone else do this?  Last month, I moved away from my model of tracking the amount of time I spent writing (in 15-minute increments of course) to tracking actual word count.  I had the optimistic goal of writing 30,000 words (a little under 1000 words or 4 double-spaced typed pages a day).  I considered these words to be “raw output” for blog entries, freelance work and my creative projects.

Courtesy of cinderellasg via Flickr

I thought, hmm 1000 words of raw output shouldn’t be hard at all.  Using Dragon Naturally Speaking some of the time, I should be able to crank out that much and still have time for editing some of the raw words into content… Right?  Wrong.  Most days I generated between 300 and 500 words. July’s grand total: 13,026 words, for a daily average of about 434 words, or a little under half of my goal.

I found that I had hit good word count numbers during the early part of the month, getting more than 1300 words for several days.  It really wasn’t that hard.  The problem was that the rough output was not publishable, especially the words generated by using Dragon Naturally Speaking.  The program worked well, but in the situations where it didn’t work, it created errors that would be embarrassing if it was sent out there.  Dragon is working out to be a decent tool, but it does require careful editing, because it does manage to enter the wrong word occasionally and those wrong words are not going to be caught by the spell check.

Later in the month, a lot of rewriting of the raw output reduced the daily word count significantly.  I also had some freelance work that didn’t help me boost the numbers since it required a lot of editing and several revisions.

This month I’m changing the approach a little and not only tracking the daily word count, but the number of words generated for each of my writing projects.  I am planning to go well beyond last month’s 30,000 word goal (for reasons to be explained next week) and I’ll try to keep track of what I manage to achieve in 15 minute. I’ll post a summary every Monday so you can see my progress. So until next Monday… keep on writing!