1,000,000 Words

Moving forward on the novel is going well, except I didn't write all weekend. Hopefully today I can sit down for at least an hour and get some new work written. It is REALLY hard not looking back at what I've already written, but I've made a vow to myself. I will. not. look. back! Unless I HAVE to look back to remember something, and even then, I'm only doing search and finds, not big reads. I really want to do this. I haven't COMPLETED a novel since graduate school.

Stephen King somewhere wrote that one does not become a good writer until she's written 1,000,000 words. I wonder whether emails and edits and status updates and Tweets, etc., count toward that 1 mil because I have to say: the prose is coming easier this time around. It's far from great, but I'm not laboring over it like I used to. I remember sitting at the computer screen thinking that nothing would ever come. Writing maybe two pages in an hour. Perhaps the story is just more concrete in my mind than those stories were, but I'm moving. I didn't think this was possible for me. It's kind of exciting.