I do this, for real, but also I was playing around with something called 4thewords, a writing subscription game where you have to write to defeat the monster. You’re on a timer. 250 words to beat a low level monster in half an hour. Ten minutes after I begin writing, I’ve beaten the monster. It’s free for the first month. Some author friends are using it so I thought I’d give it a try, at least while it’s free.

I’ve been only writing 1,000 words a day instead of my goal of 2,000 and that put me behind. Not my fault exactly as I’ve been cleaning out closets, putting away Christmas stuff, weeding, and cleaning.

Now, I had 1,000 words I’d already written on my new book, not yet scheduled in my goals, and I needed 5,000 on my vampire book, getting behinder by the day. (Yes, behinder is my word. I own it. It’s mine. You may use it, just know it’s a Terry made-up word.)

I had 153 words of my 5,000 I needed, so I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere with my word count, only maybe 1,000 on the vampire book. I played the monster game. The way I do it is I just do a low level 250 word monster, then once I have my defeated monster in 10 minutes, I pop up and go get some more house cleaning done, or feed the puppies, or take them out, or fix lunch. But then I’m back to a dedicated monster kill. And 250 words later, I’m back to some more jobs. By doing this, I actually was writing sections of my book in 250 increments and managed to get 1800 words just on the monster game and ended up with 3,000 words on the story for a total of 4,000 words yesterday, including the other book.

Does the game work? For me, it can. I could take an hour or longer to write 250 words because I was distracted by emails and such. Playing with photos or artwork. Or popping up to do some more things. Distraction after distraction. So it works! You can set up higher level monsters to fight and write longer at a sitting, but for yesterday, I liked setting it at lower word count so when I began to write, I had some idea of the scene and could just write straight through. I tend to reread sections and edit throughout, so that stops that and I just write.

Last night, I printed out what I had written and edited it. Worked great, and the scenes were great. I have to ship books today and then I’m going to try it again. I have 4,000 words I need to catch up. 2,000 for my word goal today, and 2,000 I’m still behind. And I hope I can write another 1,000 on the new story, to keep up with it a little. By January 1st, I need to just write on it. On the vampire one, I’m trying to get to the halfway point. If I finish my deadline books early, I’ll finish writing the vampire one and publish it!

Okay, off to ship books and then it’s time to write to fight monsters.

Don’t you wish everything was that easy?

Terry

“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”
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