5,000 words per day

This is my word goal. Since I've only taken a career break for six months I have to make that time count, so I have hard and fast rules about my productivity.

One of those hard and fast rules is that if I'm concentrating on marketing, I have permission to take that day off.

Another is that the weekends are mine. Sometimes that means mine to spend all of my time concentrating on other writing projects, or to finish up the marketing I didn't get around to (ie put off for as long as possible) but for-sure there is no word count on my current WIP.

If I have to go to the doctor's that counts as a sick day. I don't have to meet any word goals on those days.

If I'm actually sick, I also take a sick day, because otherwise I feel completely cheated and then sulk because my boss is a hard-arse.

But other than that, I produce 5,000 words a day on my current manuscript.

Oh, there's also an exemption for creating other media. This was meant to be so I could create audiobook versions of my work (the first of which can be found here and listened to as part of a FREE trial), but turned out to be also used for creating a video explaining exactly why I hate that Twitter changed from a star to "favourite" tweets to a heart to "like" them. Blurgh. Try using that to boost a tweet about how many people ISIS have executed this year.

Honestly, I go onto Twitter because I like sarcasm. Hearting everything may be ironic but it's not the same thing. I'm finding that I have to amp up the sarcasm just to break even and then it all starts to edge into the realm of mean, which isn't attractive. Unless you're a serial killer (of real folks, not characters).

But that's all. Other than that I'm hard at work every day getting those words done. A lot of them suck, true, but at least they're there.

Which is good because as my brain likes to remind me when I'm trying to fall blissfully asleep, at the end of this month I'll be halfway through said career break, and doesn't the second half of anything go more quickly?

Oh, the breathing gets a bit shallow in the wee hours of the morning.

To tell you the truth, I thought one of my battles was going to be getting out of bed in the morning, and the other was going to be the Playstation.

Turns out my sworn enemy is staring into the middle distance doing absolutely nothing. This is what happens when I start to search for a particular word, or need a moment to sort out the next scene. An hour later all that's happened is my eyes have had a nice rest.

Is this meditation? Thinking of nothing, looking at nothing. I could be elevating to a higher plane by accident any day now.

BTW for anybody following my blog last week I have good news about the sparrow fledgling. Turns out he wasn't a special needs sparrow as can be seen in the following picture which features fledgling (bottom) and sibling (top). He just needed a little bit of sibling rivalry to get going.

He's now flown the confines of our backyard but never fear, on Friday we gathered two replacements, Trouble One and Trouble Two.

They flew the coop yesterday, so now we're back to status quo. Until the next time...