Wednesday, 29 August 2001

No new writing. I spent some time going over my journal pages to get some metrics on my writing.

I didn't keep daily word counts for the first couple of weeks I was at Clarion. (I can probably estimate them, because I have the final lengths of the stories I wrote during that period, but I haven't done that yet). During roughly the second half of Clarion, though, I was writing about 640 words a day.

Since getting home, my output has dropped to around 220 words a day.

I told Jackie that I was disappointed about how little writing I was actually getting done. She very wisely pointed out that a much more important metric was stories submitted, which had gone up from 0 to 2. She's clever.

With that thought in my head, I started revising another Clarion story, "Political Science." It's one of the shorter ones. So far I've just gone through about a third of the mss, applying the line edits. Then I need to figure out what to do about the story. I think the right fix is to explain a tiny, tiny bit more about the situation. It puzzled a lot of people who proceeded to make noises indicating comprehension when I explained a bit more after the critique. So, maybe just one or two more sentences can make it clear.