embarrassment of riches

I have been spending the last few months noodling about with a site called 750words.com.

It is a simple site and it works like this:

I log in. It gives me a blankish page with the date on it. In the lower right corner of the page is a word counter, so as I type I can see the words accumulate. (I can anyway, what with them being written down and all, but there is something about typing and watching the word count chugging up.)

Then, once you have reached words a little box pops up that tells you that you have written the proper number of words and can now look at statistics about your writing.

For example - I see that it takes an average of 357 minutes per day to write 750 words. This makes sense because I generally wake up and do some writing in the morning and then finish up before I go to bed. My best streak is completing the 750 words 38 days in a row.

My writing is at a PG-13 level. The words I use indicate that I am introverted yet happy. I seem to think mostly about the present.

I have an adverb score of 9.4. The average adverb score is 9.9. I have no idea what that means.

In any event, I signed on a few months ago because I thought that I needed encouragement to write more. There is a school of that says that if you always write a certain amount every day, then you are always in the habit and it will help you write more. So in that way, this site works.

Two drawbacks though.

First - I find that once I have fallen off the wagon, it's hard to get back up again - those little badges and stars that pop up to tell me that I've done well start to dissapear. It easily stops being something that I am doing because I want to and turns into something that I am doing because I have to. Which is not the best way to happy me up.

Second - While 750 words a day seems a good amount, there really isn't a good mechanism to go back and strip the writing for parts. My "writing" day tends to go like this: I start writing. I write a bit about this thing and that thing. One paragraph seems like it should go to a blog post that I am meaning to write. Here's a thought about a poem that I want to come up with. "Hey my foot hurts again! I wonder if there is anything up with that?" (My foot doesn't really hurt. There is nothing up with that.)

I have now, it tells me, written 51,880 words. The problem is that I really don't have them organized in any coherent manner. There are a number of things that I have written over and over and over again. While it is a good tool to get me going, I now have all of that stuff that I don't know what to do with.

So - blogging is going to get a little strange as I now try to get into the habit of incorporating that stuff into this. Which is what I should have been doing all along.

That's five hundred twenty nine words there. Not bad for a Saturday morning.

(The number is different now. I've done a touch of editing. That's another thing about using this site. I find that I am quite frequently saying something in more words than less. I write out numbers - like five hundred twenty nine. It sort of changes that way I write, and the way I think about *what* to write).

My cunning plan for this morning was to try to chug out a 750 word (whoops, forgot to write that number out - I better add a needless parenthetical aside to make up for it. Oh and some emdashes - I have discovered that they count as words - so that changes my style a little too. (I think.) (Actually no - truth be told, I have always been an abuser of the emdash and the needless parenthetical.)) post. But I am still a bit short.

I took a break to get the coffee going. That means I get no bonus points today for writing without interruption. See - That's the sort of mindset that this site causes.

Anyhow, this sentence is going to kick me into the win column, so that means I'm off to start the day.

And don't worry. I have absolutely no intention of dumping this on you every day like this. I was just scratching it off of my increasingly long "to write about" list.