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Achilles’ Heels

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Some of you might be wondering why The Lady Of The Blog™ hasn’t been posting on a terribly regular basis since the end of the year.

You might think that her hands have shattered under the sheer volume of words typed; and you’d be forgiven for being wrong. After all, 650,000 words is a lot of words, in a single year. That’s more than ‘War and Peace’ (587,287 words), which took 3 years; ‘Atlas Shrugged’ (either 565,223 or 645,000 words depending on source) completed over 6 years; Les Misérables (530,982) a staggering tome over 17 years; and more than half the size of the entire Harry Potter series (1,084,170 words), which—according J.K. Rowling—took 17 years for all of the books.

The Lady Of The Blog™ would never claim that these were edited, readable, coherent, or even the slightest bit planned, but I watched her writing, through every struggle and trial, in every environment and circumstance: suffering illnesses, making a pilgrimage to San Francisco for ‘A Night Of Writing Dangerously’, completing 49,430 words in a week (an iPad is a great carrot to dangle), a third-degree burn (on her hand, no less), thousands of words lost to software glitches, whiplash, writing a guest blog for the folks behind NaNoWriMo, a birthday party, losing 10 days of writing time attending a wedding, and a friend’s death.

So why in the world—with all that stunning determination—would she slow down? Is it because car died and she had to shop for a new one? Is she busy writing up a couple short stories for an application to Clarion? Is it because she’s feverishly editing the miles and miles of sentences?

I don’t know. But everyone’s got a weakness. 650,000 words are not hers.

 

Spreading sturdy, delicious, and fresh-out-of-the-fridge butter on a stout slice of sourdough… might be.

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