1600/150,000 Words (1%)

Ok.  So maybe it’s a shade above one percent.  I’m a writer, not a mathematician.  I’ll be including the count as part of each post to my blog from now on.  It’s one of the few meaningful ways in which I can gauge my progress on the book.  Speaking of which, I realize I’ve yet to mention exactly what kind of book I’m writing.  Anyone who knows me personally knows I’m a huge fantasy and science fiction nerd.  I have Star Wars tattoos.  Seriously.  So with that in mind, I’m writing a western.  With magic.  To give you a brief setup we have a grizzled lawman taking his family and moving out to a small town in the middle of nowhere looking to get away from the dangers of his job.  Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a story if things actually worked out that way…  Soon I will have a sample up and posted for you to peruse.  And I don’t mean soon in geological terms either.  Now, where’s my fedora?

I’m the sort of off again on again writer that so many of us with real lives and distractions tend to be.  I’ve been working on one incarnation of my current work-in-progress or another for half a decade now, at the very least.  Recently things in my life have crystalized, and like many others I’m realizing that there is no such thing as too much time.  In fact, there are only varying degrees of not enough.

Certainly it should be plain to all that your time is limited in a very real way, not merely by your job or family responsibilities, but by the very fact that one day you will die.  Horribly.  Screaming and writhing.  Ok, maybe that last part isn’t a given, but you get my point.  Each of us only has so much time to accomplish the things we deem important.  For me, I’ve often set my writing on the backburner with the dial constantly set to low.   It’s time to rotate the pans, and start to really cook.  Stay tuned to this space for periodic tastes of what’s coming up.  It’s going to be an adventure.  No whip or fedora required.  But let’s face it, a whip and fedora make everything better.

-Paul J Andrew