Dear Peter, I commend your dedication to your writing. Yesterday, I myself plotted out how much I'm working per day to grow on Medium, Substack, and my personal site, DonaldJClaxton.com.

I spend between 7.5 hours to 13.25 hours per day here at the desk or in my video studio (the other side of the den) creating.

And I was amazed to see how many distractions and interruptions remain in the way.

I now have three draft novels. One is close to being ready once again to query. But as of now, I've taken a year off from it to set all this other stuff up, and to figure out where, what, and who I am after a debilitating back injury and umpteen surgeries and procedures the last six years.

And I'm on the edge of losing everything apartment, health insurance, etc. because I can't work a normal job, plus I'm on enough medicines to put a horse to sleep.

But I have begun to get off the mat and my family does not understand. "Go get a real job," is something I've heard a several dozen times too many.

This is what I can do, and this is what I want to do. Not only that, this work makes me happiest.

So I ask people to follow me here, read my material, and jump over to Substack and subscribe to Disquisition, Full-Frontal Nudity of the Soul for writers, and The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club. Recently, I've added a new YouTube channel and am plugging that in, along with my new website, DonaldJClaxton.com.

I want to get back to revising my novel; The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club. It has had enough time over the last year for the spices in it to blend like good spaghetti sauce. I won't be going to self-publishing route if I can help it. But I'm hopeful it is working out well for you.

One thing I have stopped doing, however, is paying attention to how many words I generate per day. Goals are good and great, but in the end, how many of those 1K words disappear in revision, re-revision, re-re-revision?

Remember, Hemingway said the first draft of anything is "Shit."

I used to be a person who would tweet that I'd written 2,500 words in a day. I don't do that any longer as I learned, for me, that doing so took some of the energy I had for writing the project, and the spirit of the project lost something each time.

My focus is on the primary elements of the Hero's Journey, writing them in the proper order, and then I apply a layer of Sean Coyne's The Story Grid and the five factors for each scene, the genre, and the world view to each.

Being able to ID each of those components in a scene, along with Robert McKee's negation-of-the-negation and the polarity change are more critical to the outcome for me than how many words it takes me to get there.

Just a few thoughts to consider. I'm not at all saying writing 1K words per morning is a bad thing. In fact, I have been writing Morning Pages via Julia Cameron, for a good five years now.

So keep doing it because it works for YOU!

Thank you for your post. What I received the most from it is the essential requirement to set a goal for each day and make sure the target is acquired.

And let us not forget the importance of planning. In my head right now, I can hear actor/former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson saying in "The Hunt for Red October," that "The average Russki doesn't take a dump without a plan."

Possibly the only positive influence on can ascribe to their population.

As you likely know by now, it's easy to get distracted. I have the iMac for video, graphics, and web posting, etc. But my favorite thing to do is begin with a first draft on one of my three typewriters, and then make the text digital with my 17" MacBook Pro.

That MBP has the smoothest key action in the world. One of the last models Apple produced before they messed up laptop keyboards!

Peter, I wish you all the luck in the world with your writing!

Thank you for positing, and as Ottessa Moshfegh told me about full-frontal nudity of the soul for writers, "Stay Nude!"

That means write from the deepest essence of your soul and when you do, the word count is less critical. You likely will have a renewed purpose. That of digging deep into your soul and pulling out emotions you don't realize are there and getting those onto your pages. And that's where the true magic in writing lives!

All the best, Donald J. "Donny" Claxton.