Sweeping Through March

It's been a pretty crazy week. Last week, since I didn't live in the Seattle area, I hadn't considered that the world was going to end at all. Then, on Wednesday, I showed up for work, and found out that we were going to have an extra long news show that day because the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo had been canceled. Let me tell you, if there was any way they could possibly have kept that open, they would have. There's nothing in the world more important to a Houstonian than the rodeo. They'd give up the Rockets, Astros, and even Texans combined as long as they were allowed to keep the rodeo. So, I knew that it was a big deal. The world really was coming to an end.

Luckily, I had foreseen some of the things that were coming our way, and had gone to the store and grabbed some food stores before the run on food began. So, I was okay. It wasn't likely to be a big problem if the store didn't get stocked up for a few weeks. Me and mine could make it that long. So, when I went to the store on the way home, and it looked like this:

I wasn't too upset.

However, I was admittedly pretty worried, distracted, and a little bit depressed about the whole thing. I was having a bit of a hard time mustering the will to care enough to sit down to a keyboard and type for an hour or more a day. I was very much like Alvie Singer on Annie Hall when he was a kid and he'd learned that the universe was expanding and would someday break apart.



Everytime I sat down to write, I thought, just like little Alvie, "What's the point?" When we're all dead, who's going to read this stuff?

Not only that, but there was crazy news going on at the same time. So many things to keep me distracted from the job at hand. I should write...but oh my God, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have Coronavirus. I should write but...oh my God, they canceled the NBA...MLS...Major League Baseball...NHL...NFL combine...golf...darts...tiddlywinks. I should write but...Justin Trudeau's wife has Coronavirus and they're both in quarantine. I need to text my wife. Could this be the end of Canada as we know it?

Somehow, however, I managed to focus long enough to get my words in all week long. So, here's my chart so far for March:

So, I've written every day, and I've reached 15,498 words for the month now. How does that stack up toward my goal for the month of 33,604 words? Well, here's my progress update:

15498 / 33604 (46.12%)

So, I'm at 46%, and 14 is 45% of 31 days, so I'm still ahead. I think I'll easily beat it, as long as I manage to write 1,000 every day. That will be 31,000 words. The slop that comes along with all of that writing will easily equal 33,604. So, I'm not worried about that.

How about my other goal of finishing my writing up earlier in the day...well, I think this screengrab sums it all up:

That is a screen grab of my Google Drive that I use to both write my book in each day as well as keep track of my word count. Notice underneath each of those boxes the message that says, "You often open around this time." Google tries to have the files that you use most at any particular time up and available for you to click on and open when that time arrives and you are looking for them. The problem is that I took that screengrab at 12:30 AM, as I was starting to write on Thursday.

In other words, Google was telling on me. I have been writing late into the night, instead of early in the morning like my goal I'm supposed to be striving to fulfill dictates. So, no, I am not doing a good job with that goal.

There's nothing I can do about past failures, though, right? All I can do is strive to be better in the future. So, I'm going to keep writing, and keep working on writing earlier in the day so that I'm not up all not long, making myself too tired to write decent prose the next day, because you know it's not going to be gripping stuff that keeps the reader on the edge of his seat if the writer couldn't stay awake while he was writing it.