Gooooaaaaallll!!!!

 11 October 2022

I've heard it said that it's important to write down your goals, or better yet, tell people about them, and therefore create some semblance of accountability.  I've never been a big fan of the stuff, myself (although I was for a while trying to create some regular accountability meetings with JP et al, which for one reason or another never stuck).

Well, ever since I read Stephen King's On Writing (which is not yet being catalogued here*, but could be) I have had in the back of my mind Steve's tautological assertion that if you want to think of yourself as a writer, you have to write, and his definition of that was 1,000 words per day "when you're working on something", 6 days per week (although he himself he said didn't tend to take a day off he allowed for it if you're so inclined).  I took this one small slice of King's great book about the craft of writing, and have at various times committed myself to producing just that amount of writing, though only very occasionally and in fits and starts.  This blog, in fact, is the result of that effort (zombies notwithstanding), although some of you who are particularly strong in the art of arithmetic may catch on to the fact that this blog does not, in fact, always publish 1,000 words of content every day.  "Very astute, hm!?, Dodger," as Sol Cohen might say.  There have, indeed been other outlets for the word count dump - including journaling and free-writing, a not inconsiderable quantity of drafts that have not yet been posted to this blog, the fiction and the academic and non-academic non-fiction drafts that sit in the various stacks or sacks or hard drives or cloud drives of my biographical path - although for the most part the days these last 22 years or so since I read King's book have been without 1,000 words, and I am therefore not, sad to say, a writer, perhaps, most notably, perhaps, because, I have not really

published any of the quantity of prose that I've been accumulating and producing lo these many years.

But then, I once again read the introduction to Stephen King's Four Past Midnight, which I'm planning to start reading again shortly again some 20+ years after first encountering it (and could also rightly include here*, but because I'm revisiting in toto, I won't, at least for now).  In the intro, King talks about publishing this book of four novellas, and some of the financial implications (in passing) of publishing this book and another, similarly structured one some 7 years earlier (and also, oddly, about Robin Yount).  But then King talks about the writing of these novellas (and of his writing in general), and how he does that just for himself (and to keep himself sane, he says), and it occurs to me (not for the first time) that I don't really need to publish anything to be a writer - to be an author, maybe, but not a writer.  All I have to do that is to write, right?  

And so (as I guess I have done at least once before here), I commit myself again to the 1,000 word goal, and the goal of being a writer.

My, that was easy.  I'm done now.

* Initially, my plan had been to post this as part of my Post of Lost Lasts (an ongoing post project whereby I list all the things that would belong in my Arfives {an archive of all past Last 5s}, but I either saw / read / etc. in their entirety before the beginning of the archive or was otherwise missed) as a joke about accountability, because no one in their right minds would still be reading updates that I am making to this post in October 2022 nearly 3 years after the original post^, and so the idea of writing goals to be accountable to in that post would be pretty funny.  But then, as it turned out, I thought this post was actually kind of valuable and so re-post it here.

^ for more quixotic perpetual posts that nobody will likely ever read, see The Star Trek Chronology.