Million Words Update - Day . . . Who Knows

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

-Ray Bradbury

I'm coming to the end of another long and harrowing week of hardcore writing. Both my bad and good days are resulting in higher word counts and I continue to chip away at my deficit. I've committed to reach for 25,000 words a week in an effort to close that gap as soon as possible. I haven't quite reached that this week, but I've come darn close.

I'm starting to notice what Bradbury means about staying drunk on writing. When I come away from a good string of speedy drafting sessions I feel what I can only describe as a buzz in my head. It's both exhillirating and exhausting. I've been known to take ten or fifteen minute naps between writing sprints. Sometimes the process just knocks me out.

Now, I've never been drunk, but I now know for a fact that writing can make you feel drunk in a manner of speaking. I feel dizzy with the feeling of achievement, but beyond that I can feel impulses dancing across my corpus collosom in a flood of electricity that only comes from sustained creative effort. As tiring as it is, it's a feeling I think everyone should earn the privelage of experiencing in their lives.

I'm in the sunset of my current novel, trying to wrap up Act III in a barn-burning conclusion. Meanwhile I rather marvel at how this kind of sustained effort grows my writing skills. I've been interested in writing for a long time, and I've read a lot of books on the subject. In fact, I highly recommend Ray Bradbury's life-changing book called "Zen In The Art Of Writing." But no number of books on writing or classes can make up for the concrete experience of pulling pages upon pages of words down from out of the ether, putting them down forever in black and white.

I still question sometimes if this is more than I can do. The answer is always "No," at the end of the day, but I have my moments. I don't deny for a second that what I'm attempting here borders on the insane, but I have a persistent feeling inside pushing me on, telling me over and over again "It will be worth it."

Well, enough gassing on. Time to belly up to the bar again. Cheers!

-Tom