One of my goals lately has been to establish a writing routine and produce a certain number of words each day. In attempting to meet this goal, I joined a writing site that requires me to log in and do just that. This site faithfully keeps a word tally and tracks who is fully participating.

Every day I get an email reminding me to write my words. Unfortunately that email goes to an account I consistently forget to check. Every so often I remember, and then I feel a little guilty when I go in and delete several weeks’ worth of reminders. For a few minutes I feel bad that I am not letting the site count my words.

This exercise is supposed to be done first thing in the morning, to clear your head and get you ready to seize the day, to accept open-minded the onslaught of words that this process unleashes. If you keep at it, the theory goes, you will soon have a manuscript of sorts in your hot little hand. The idea is sound, if you can get yourself to follow a linear thought for 300 pages, or 60,000 to 90,000 words.

I don’t know if it’s that I don’t have the discipline, or maybe the tenacity, to stick with one work in progress, or that I am stretching myself too thin having more than one WIP.  I know which one I want to finish editing and polishing; I just can’t make myself do it. The subject matter is still a little raw for me perhaps. Or maybe I’ve been letting it stew a little too long in my consciousness.

But, I know I will get to it, when the time is right because write, I do. Every day. And since I gave myself the assignment of posting daily on this blog for the month of December, I find a myriad of ideas suffusing my brain. The list of topics or situations I want to write about keeps getting longer.

I don’t know if I will be able to develop them all during this month; it is going by faster than I expected. But, I will keep jotting them down and expanding on them on my trusty index cards for future essays, blog posts, fiction and nonfiction pieces.

And I think I will relieve that particular website from its daily email duties to me. It’s a good idea, but obviously not for this writer, or at least not yet.