According to my not very accurate calculations, it’s been just over a year since I started blogging — two or three times a week, around 300 words at a time.
Which adds up to approximately 50,000 words.
Coincidentally (or not), each one of my five novels has run to about 50,000 words.
Perhaps this means I could have written another whole book while I was blathering about not very much.
Or perhaps not. There isn’t much of a plot running through my blog, though who knows? If I keep going for another 50,000 words, one might emerge. It’ll be the story of a person writing a book (or two books) and thinking about a thousand other things while she does it. Success, failure, frustration, nature, horses, family, other people, dogs, love, life, death, London, America, books, films, friends, random encounters, and the mixed-up contents of a not-very-organized brain.
Of course there’s also the story of the blogs I don’t write. The angry, grim, politically incorrect ones. The dark ones. The ones not fit for public consumption.
That stuff simmers quietly away in my brain, like stock, waiting to cook down into a form that will flavour the next book.
Happy Book Week, everyone.
I know a story that sprung up from a blog.. It’s at 40,000 words right now – I’ll keep writing I think.. It’s a lot of fun (beats wiring hands down!)
I know another story that sprung up from a comment that got stuck in a spam filter. The world is just full of damn stories, Ray!
I love the idea of all that ‘other’ stuff simmering away like stock!
I’m just embarking on the whole blogging thing and so it’s reassuring to realise that it’s the randomness that makes your blog so fun to come back to each time… there’s hope for the scatter-brained everywhere!
This has become my theory. Take your faults. Make virtues of them. Don’t blink when people look surprised.
But doesn’t writing the blog kickstart your book-writing brain?
That’s what I tell myself, at any rate, when I’m battling with the thought that maybe I’ve just come up with another brilliant way to procrastinate that is somehow more easy to justify than occupying my time seeing who’s up for a chat on Facebook.
Oh – and reading other people’s blogs!
50k words is worth a celebration! Well done Meg. I’m guessing that you haven’t found this blog process as frustrating as fine-tuning your novels?
Ah, you guess right…..
Yes. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.
You know, sometimes a good stock can be just as nourishing as a whole meal…