Words Count

In my ghosting around the triple-w, the worldwide web, I've noticed real writers on their real blogs sometimes display a sidebar daily word counter, to show themselves as well as interested others how they're doing, daily word-count-wise.

I've been wondering how mine would look. One day's worth. So here's a sampling of my writing word counts. Friday's. Because I'm not free time-wise to fulltime work on my many projects I'd be only too happy to work fulltime on, I'm counting in the wide range of writing opportunities Friday presented me: jottings, notings, emails at work, and the grocery list.

Friday morn dream notes: 56 words.

Editing Last Joe, Chapter 7, during breakfast: 116 excised; 48 grafted in; -68 words. Um. Yeah.

Day-job emails: 616 words.

Roughing-out this blog, Friday night: 109 words.

Friday night's grocery list for Saturday morn: 42, including pictograms.

Pictograms? Aye. Instead of, say, Hot Sauce Herring in the 100 gram tin, I'll scribble HOT, and sketch a fish. Pictograms are great. Pictograms and words, together, are like a full-brain wow. Left and right brains handshaking across the corpus callosum. I'm a firm believer even the humble grocery list can, perhaps should, become a full-brain exercise. For warding off urban zombie-ism.

But back to the topic. I wasn't surprised most of my Friday's writing wasn't spent on the make-believe worlds inside my head. I only wish I was thinking about Last Joe, or anything, other than those work emails totaling 616 words, late Friday night.