Today's Writing Challenge

My normal target goal for each day of writing is one thousand words.  I usually exceed this, but a thousand is very doable and good for those days when the words just don’t seem to want to come.  It also works out well that a thousand words is the commonly accepted length for flash fiction, which I really enjoy writing these days.   If I can’t seem to get anything else going, I can usually brainstorm up a flash piece and knock it out for the day.  Sometimes they suck.  Sometimes they’re acceptable.  Every once in a while, I get a really good one.  Those are the keepers.

Some days, like I said, I exceed my thousand-word limit.  I easily hit two thousand quite often, and sometimes even three.  I’ve exceeded five thousand a couple of times, and my all time record is sixty-five hundred, which I did on a day when my wife was out of town, and I was in a groove, so I decided to skip dinner and just keep writing until late in the night.

I’ve been getting a lot of writing done lately, which is a good thing, but much of it hasn’t been prose writing.  I’ve picked up a project  to do a rewrite on a screenplay for a producer friend of mine, and I’m also doing some writing for the Bail Out web series (and hopefully, someday, TV series) that I’m also working on as First Assistant Director.  There’s nothing wrong with this...any writing is good writing.  I’m not opposed to continuing to work in screenwriting from time to time, so it’s good to keep my skills up in that area, and all the words count toward my daily goals.   But my first love is prose writing, so want to keep working in that area as much as possible.  Since I know I have some screenwriting commitments this week, I decided that today I would do a marathon prose writing session, and see if I can beat my personal best and crank out seven thousand words of prose today. 

As I type this, I am already three hundred and fifty words toward that goal (blog entries count).  So, here goes.  I’ll report back on how I did. 

UPDATE:  Mission Accomplished.  7271 words in six hours.  Whew!  I'm spent!  Two stories knocked out. An SF piece and a mainstream piece.