I feel like figuring out how to approach this topic is akin to trying to take a bite out of a whale’s ass.  It’s just too big.  I can’t figure out which angle to go at it with.  (There’s an image for you.)

Well, let’s first identify what we’re talking about here.  I went to Dictionary.com and looked up “speed.” Here are some definitions that suit our purpose here:

Full, maximum, or optimum rate of motion; to promote the success of an undertaking; further, forward, or expedite; to succeed or prosper; to the maximum of one’s capabilities; operating at full or optimum speed.

Wow.  Imagine that.  Imagine what it would be like to be working at the maximum of your capabilities, operating at full or optimum speed.  Of course success and prosperity are included in the definitions of speed.

Let’s say right now you are not working at your full potential.  I’m just going out on a limb here.  Don’t feel bad.  This is not a terrible thing.  All it really means is you just haven’t leveled off yet.  If you’re still breathing, you’re still in the game.  (Lucky for me….)  There’s still lots of better up ahead.

The best part:  You don’t know yet what you’re capable of.

What if you discover, after getting rid of all the mental junk and streamlining your work habits, that your sweet spot is 3,000 words a day?  Ah-ah!  Don’t scare it away.  Just, what if?

That’s over a million words in a year…or 11 longish novels.  Close your eyes and imagine 11 books with your name on them.

You like that, don’t you?  Me, too.

So.  This is our task set before us.  This month we are going to discover our full and optimum speed in order to further, forward, and expedite our success and prosperity…and then we’re going to have one hell of a party!

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P.S.  Tomorrow’s post is a complete mystery to me…but it may or may not involve dried elbow pasta.

P.S.S.  Considering I spent over five hours writing this post every which way — don’t judge me — I’m going to add the word count of today’s post to the Word Pile:  362.

P.S.S.S.  Yes, I am aware of the irony.  Be quiet.

Tonight I am finishing up court reporting work (to pay for all those Nutter Butters), so my word count today is quite small.  I humbly offer you my 305 words, a result of a five-minute typing up-chuck just prior to showing up here.  (Remember, the goal is speed, not quality.)  And thank you to everyone who’s down to groove and boogie on word counts this month!  We’re gonna have so much fun!  And don’t worry…soon we will have something widget-licious in the sidebar to illustrate all our hard work.

Lest you think I am discouraged by my admittedly slight word count, know you this:  I am not discouraged.  I am simply laying down the kindling, the foundation of an awesome Burning Word Man Bonfire — ooh! maybe — or whatever we end up doing.  So write each word for the flames and worry not for its future, for its destiny is now.

Ahem.

Yes, I am terribly silly.  But rest assured, all these shenanigans doesn’t mean real work is not being done.

Speaking of real work — meaning, the writing — I thought tonight I would share with you a fairly recent web find.  Perhaps everyone already knows about this website…after all, I just discovered Duotrope not too long ago.  (Yes, I’m the rotten egg.¹)  Anyway, at the risk of being the goober shouting out yesterday’s news, I wanted to bring it to your attention…in case you’re the goober standing behind me.

So for those of you who have yet to make her acquaintance, I want you to meet Miss Snark’s First Victim.

Now, I don’t know Authoress, the woman in charge, personally, and I feel compelled to reiterate that her blog is fairly new to me, but it’s apparent that she’s created something epic, as evidenced by her latest blog post entitled, “Another Success Story.” This is the blog’s seventh or eighth success story.  If reading this blog doesn’t make you want to chain yourself to your desk until the novel is finally done, then I don’t know what will.

Once all the dead-tree traffic has cleared off my desk, I plan on sitting down and reading as much of Miss Snark’s First Victim² archives as I can.  And if you are serious about finding an agent for your novel-length project, I recommend you do the same.

These are our tribesmen, folks.  When you come across little hamlets of wonderment like this on the Internet, and the people are doing what you wish you were doing, then that’s where you need to pitch a tent and make some friends.

So go on…try to get a good spot.  I’ll catch up later with some beers.  First, I want to find the wood surface of my desk…I think it’s wood…it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.

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¹ Let my last-to-show-up-rotten-egginess be a lesson to you:  read, read, read! Learn about the industry you are trying to break into!  I am mostly directing these exclamation points at myself…just so you know!

² I also thought I should mention that Miss Snark is another blog on my archive-diving list.  It seems like every aspiring writer worth their salt knows of the legendary Miss Snark and her “T-Rexual heels of stiletto snark.”  Two and a half million hits over two years before Miss Snark retired the blog.  You know the rule.  If all the locals eat there, you know it’s gotta be good.

I started out this year with six very specific goals geared towards building a Writing Career of Significant Worth:

1)  I want to write more…a lot more…as in I want to sweat, sneeze, and bleed fiction.  Vomitus de Muse, Fiction Eruptus. That’s Latin for prolific and inspired.

2)  I want to edit that fiction. No, not just edit it.  I want to make that shit sparkle like Edward in the noonday sun.

3)  I want to submit said sparkly fiction. Momma needs to get brave, pack them sandwiches, give them lots of hugs and kisses, and wish them good luck as she puts them in a cab.  It is time for all the stories to grow up and fulfill their destiny.  “And don’t come home without a paycheck!”

4)  The platform, I wants to build one. What do you think we’re standing on here?  Sure, it passes code.  Why do you ask?

5)  Accountability. This is a transparent attempt to trick myself into doing my work using reverse psychology and false deadlines and penalties…but I think I’m on to myself.  I may have to resort to urban legends about the Muse Patrol…you know, that ghostly gang of scorned muses who stalk, mob, and tear apart writers who don’t write?  Didn’t you know the gift of writing is located in a writer’s gizzard, tucked right underneath our big fat egos?  And if you don’t use it, they come to take it back….  Yeah, I’m not buying that one either.

6)  Read more short stories. I want to drink deeply from the well.  I want to be on the other side of the relationship between writer and reader more often.  I want someone else to do the driving.  I want to be directed and misled, tricked and delighted.  I want to fill myself with the words of others.  I want to walk in other worlds, crash into strangers, fall in love with them, and escape with them via solar pods to planets made of mercury and ash.  I cannot create in a vacuum.  There is always give and take, and that, bruddah, is the circle of life.

~~~

So how am I doing so far?  Well, I spent most of January blogging and hammering together my “platform,” to be quite honest.  There hasn’t been much time left over for the fiction, something I need to correct posthaste.  I need to catch up with my Write1Sub1 obligations.  Even so, I feel like I’m in a nice, well-greased groove as being in work mode, which is priceless.  I just need to get faster, dammit!

Which leads us to this month’s obsession:  speed.  (Italics makes the word look faster, don’t you think?)  The most important item on the above list is — wait for it — No. 1, writing.  No surprise there.  There is no Writing Career of Significant Worth without the writing.

Here’s my problem — and it’s not a unique or uncommon problem — I don’t have a lot of time.  I really don’t.  I won’t bore you with my violin-accompanied sob story, but I’ve got a toddler and a husband stationed out of state.  You get the picture.  But I understand that Joe over in Sherman Hills spends two hours a day in his car.  And I get that the PTA is depending on Violet down in Texas to organize this year’s bake sale gala.

We all have the same sob story.  We all have children and spouses and jobs and commutes — important things! — that take up our time, and rightly so.  It’s called life.

But what makes art great is not what we’re capable of creating under perfect conditions — there’s no such animal — but rather what we actually create under imperfect conditions.  It is the challenges and obstacles that enrich our writing.  The harder we have to fight to create, the more value it has.

So I accept that I have certain limitations on my time that cannot be negotiated, and I choose instead to make the most of the time I do have.  And that means getting faster…because I am at this point in my life incessantly barraged with new story ideas, and I am afraid that I will become buried in their lifeless, unmanifested husks and haunted by the ghosts of their unfulfilled destinies if I don’t get a handle on it now.  The situation is urgent.

So this month my focus is on making fiction and lots of it…and quickly.  I don’t believe speed has to have a detrimental effect on first draft material.  In a lot of ways, it serves the writer to have a part of the process in which they are free to spew out all the tropes and clichés, scratch that itch, lay on the purple thick and gooey.  All the mistakes and groan-worthy metaphors will be excised later.  Let all the cheese come out.  Go on.  The important thing is that we make something to work with in post-production, which we will worry about later.

So speed…how do we do this?  I want to be very specific.  I want to take the river of poetry that flows within me and turn it into Niagara Fucking Falls.  Profane emphasis intended, deliberate, and calculated.  Why am I getting all at-the-docks-after-sunset about it?  Because sometimes you have to be if you want to be a contender.  So crank open those gates, let it come rushing out.  Cast out the monkeys in their barrels and give them the ride of their life!

And yes, writing like this means I most certainly will have to backtrack at times, but that’s okay.  Ferreting out and marking dead ends in stories is just part of the process.  Gotta be done.  Somebody’s gotta clear the sewers.

So in the words of Ray Bradbury, “Work.  Relaxation.  Don’t think.” This month is going to be all about speed.  Speed, speed, speed, my friends!  We are going to drill.  We will time ourselves.  We are going to kindle life into as many story ideas as we can.  This month we are going to see just how many words we can write to keep the Muse Patrol away.  Hang on to your gizzards, ladies and germinators!  (I don’t worry about mine as it is deeply ensconced and protected by my ginormous ego.)

So are you with me?  Be with me!  Be a come-with friend.  I will share my word counts each day, and you can post your word counts in the comments.  I will put together some sort of cumulative word count widget that I will install along the side here so that we can see just how big a pile of words we can make together.

And it doesn’t matter what kind of words they are, whether they’re song lyrics, blog posts, articles, novels…whatever it is that you’re writing, count those words.  They all count!  Just throw them in the comments, and I will pitch-fork them on top of the heap.  This will be like NaNoWriMo, except without the NaNo.  So really, this is just WriMo.

Anyway, at the end of the month, we can celebrate.  Maybe we’ll stack all of our words together into an elaborate tower of language and set it afire and dance by its light…and from the ashes will arise loud, squawking phoenixes…which we will take home and feed and preen their feathers and send them to editors to sing to them and convince them to give us money.  It is a good plan, yes?

But if this don’t float yer boat, don’t worry.  I got fun stuff coming, educational stuff, cheesy stuff…plus, there’s still the little matter of 72 Nutter Butters.

So now we come to the end of the Blog Overhaul, and I must admit, pink am I tickled.  I originally decided to write about overhauling my blog as a way to share the process with other Gonnabe Writers who might be thinking about their own web presence…and also as a kick in my own pants to clean up around here and start looking like a professional.

My goals for “overhauling” the blog were pretty basic and simple.  I wanted it to be more readable, more pretty, and I wanted more people to come by and hopefully enjoy it and tell their friends.  As far as meeting all the tasks on the “Overhaul List,” things went great.  Tasks were completed and blogged about.  I am happy with how the blog looks, and I feel it looks more professional than my “old look.”  Mission accomplished!

But I got way more out of doing this series than a better-looking blog.  One of the best things to come out of all of this was all the “oh-ing,” “duh-ing,” and forehead slapping that was happening on this side of the keyboard.  I think I may have opened up a few new connections in the old gray matter.  Yes, lightning may have occurred a few times.

For instance, in the first post of the series, “Blog Overhaul, Day 1 – Layout,” my intention was simply to share a few blog templates I liked and discuss their pros and cons and why I chose the one I did.  No biggie.  Like shopping with the girls, right?  “I liked the white one, but the black was more slimming…but my Carlos Santanas are red….”

Shopping so can too be a learning experience.  Not only did this little exercise force me to pay attention to what I like and don’t like in websites, but it forced me to learn my blogging software.  YOU MUST LEARN YOUR SOFTWARE!  It doesn’t matter if it’s blogging software or word processing software…whatever.  Whatever you need software for, if you learn it, your life will be better.  (And no, I still haven’t fully mastered my court reporting software…but it is so on the to-do list!)

And by the way, I want to emphasize that all of these seemingly technical aspects of designing the look of your blog are really very easy.  WordPress’s software is like one big blog wizard.  Once I sat down and just played around with all the buttons, I really got to understand how much control I have over how I present my content.  This, in turn, has made me think much more strategically about how to direct readers to information that I hope they will read and like.

For one thing, I have learned to link to relevant past posts, as you’ve probably noticed.  I used to consider individual blog posts as having a rather short shelf life.  And if you’re blogging every day, it’s easy for things to get pushed quickly down the screen and off into the archives.  But by linking past relevant posts, not only do you give your content a second chance at life, so to speak, but it gives you an opportunity to catch a new reader up to speed in an easy way and give a sense of continuity.  And why wouldn’t you want to point someone in the direction of past relevant content that you worked so hard to produce, right?

(By the way, if you’ve noticed my emphasis on linking to relevant content, you get a happy face.  🙂  Why is this important?  People get annoyed at being pointed to “dead ends”…at least I do.  It’s important to make sure that your description or hint of the content attached to the link matches the clicker’s expectations and makes sense in the context of a post.  Just saying….)

I also now pay closer attention to how each post looks on the page, where it appears, and how long it looks like that, depending on the content.  There are so many things that you can tweak and customize for each blog post.  It kind of geeks me out.  It really does.

In my effort to improve my “About Me” page, I ended up murderizing it…which led me to reconsider my approach and do a quick study of other authors’ bios…which helped me to figure out what kind of information was important for people to know about me in this blogging context.  In addition to helping me create a new “About Me” page I was happy with, it also helped me learn more about me — just kidding. 😉  I couldn’t resist.  Seriously, though, the effort was worthwhile and meaningful, and it helped to put me into a professional mindset.  I know, kind of boring, but I can’t always be a kook.

The next thing on the list was dealing with my “welcome mat,” something I had never, ever paid attention to before.  Sure, I read them on other people’s blogs, but it never occurred to me that I should explain to new visitors where the hell they’ve landed.  I know.  Captain Obvious here.  Anyway, being as my target audience is other writers and creative types, it only makes sense to let them know that they have arrived in friendly territory.  Park the mother ship around back.

The last thing on my little to-do list was to update my blog header image to something more pretty and relevant than the old blog header, which featured a snapshot I took a while back of a sunflower.  I must admit, it was a little uncharacteristic of me to embark on something more elaborate than finding something on deviantART that I liked (and could get permission for), but the DIY spirit was in me and I wanted to make it mine, if that makes any sense.

The resulting blog post, “Blog Overhaul, Day 6:  Epic Photo Shoot,” was selected to be featured on WordPress’s Freshly Pressed page, a tremendous honor in these blogging parts.  This was truly an unexpected, serendipitous gift for me.  In many ways, it gave legitimacy to what I’ve been doing here at my desk all hours of the night with my hair unkempt holding court to a gang of dirty coffee mugs.  That this particular post was selected means more to me than I could ever articulate.  I received so many kind and encouraging comments, you guys made me feel epic.  Thank you.

(I am still working my way through all the comments with much gratitude, so if I haven’t responded to you yet, please do not feel slighted.)

Funny thing, I started a draft of this post a few days ago, before being anointed by the Powers that Press Freshly, and I’m chuckling at this line:  “…discuss how much my traffic has increased…[due to posting daily].”  At the time I wrote that, I was a proud and beaming momma over a best day stats of 55 views.  I still am proud of that day because those were views I got myself.  However, since being Freshly Pressed on Friday, I have had over 3,500 views and counting.  Boggled and flabbergasted, stunned and humbled, thrilled and SQUEE! about covers it.

It remains to be seen what the long-term effect will be of this wonderful honor, but in the meantime, I feel galvanized, inspired, and lightning-powered in my blogging efforts.  I may, sometime in the near future, blog about how the post-Freshly-Pressed stats are coming along, but if you’re interested in reading about other bloggers’ experiences of being Freshly Pressed, I recommend you start here.

Lastly, if you’re reading this far — and I apologize for the length of this post — I hope you will forgive me if I light a stick of patchouli and wax a little metaphysical.

Anyone who knows me best knows that my favorite book is Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art.” In the chapter entitled, “Approaching the Mystery,” Pressfield writes:  “…when we sit down day after day and keep grinding…a process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid.  Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose. […] When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us.”

Every time I sit down at my desk to write, I always have this image in my head of something strange and powerful in the aether raising its head in expectation, eager to read over my shoulder…and when it likes what it sees, spinning its fingers joyfully in the threads of the Universe, somehow shifting things in a way I can neither predict nor imagine.  But it’s always something I can rely on if I do my work.

I know this makes me sound like I wear lots of rings on every finger and clackety sets of teeth strung with feathers around my neck, but I swear it’s true.  I believe it.  I have seen too many things in my life not to believe it.

I also believe that we are all here to fulfill some potential that is uniquely ours, and when we put effort towards that potential, somehow we make the world a better place and more good things come our way.

All right.  End of sermon.  You can all put your lighters away.  Thanks for listening.  Namaste.

Anyway, I’m done fiddling with the blog…for now.  My only goal for it next month is figuring out how to migrate the whole thing over to my own domain name.  But that’s for next month’s concerns.  Tonight, I rest…and watch a bunch of episodes of “Lost.”