Preemptive Retaliation

When I logged into my banking app I had a message waiting for me. Check out your finances, Wrapped! Let’s look at trends and spending insights for the past year! No thank you. No. No thank you.

My Spotify Wrapped was underwhelming this year. It’s been a year of not-enough-new-music which has left me feeling terribly-uncool. I used to wear a short sleeved t-shirt over a long sleeved t-shirt! I used to be cool! Now it’s just the same old albums, three sporadically listened to podcasts, and the soundtrack to whatever film Lily is obsessed with at the moment.

Steam has also graced me with a wrapped, which is nice to look at. They go deeper with the stats, pointing out how often I played what game when – charting out my gaming mood throughout the year and not as a single blob of activity. I’ll be honest, this is the one I look forward to the most. I on-and-off wrestle with the idea that videogaming is a waste of time in substitution of something more creative and productive, and the graphs really hammer down on that idea. Hey Joe, did you know that you spent all of May playing this one game? Take a look at it alongside the other games you wiled away your evenings with.

But that’s not half the story. It’s not even less than half. This year I have spent three hundred and forty-one days writing. 341, out of 366. And I’m not even at the end of the year yet, so lets be conservative and bump that up to 345. That’s almost 95% of the year writing.

I’m half writing this to tell you, half in awe of myself.

I have a habit tracking app where I record these things. If I’ve written at least 300 words (or one page of Moleskine) in a day I check it off. The thing is… I love a good streak. Once I had a thousand day streak of Gaelic (and remember about three phrases, but that’s neither here nor there). Each time I look at the app I see the streak which is currently at 20 days, though the highest is 118. But ignoring the streaks, ignoring the sick days, the busy days, the holidays, a 95% rate is a good one. A good metric to hit, never mind to shoot for.

In that 95% I have redrafted 92,000 words, and written at least 48,000 new ones. That’s on average 410 words per written day. With any luck I’ll finish the first draft of my AI novel by February, and have a second draft by April. And then I can give it to friends and wait on tenterhooks whilst another idea takes hold. And then I rinse and repeat, and rinse and repeat.

When I talk to people I wonder when I can introduce myself as a capital W Writer. When I’ve published a book? When I have a series, a tableau of short stories in magazines? Or is it when I’ve spent almost every day this year at this keyboard or with a pen? Probably the latter, but it’ll take a while for me to admit it.