I'm really weird about my writing. I have a horrendous attention span, but I go through phases where I lock in like crazy, and that's where I get most of my work done. My daily patterns gradually shift over time, and it's when I'm alone all night while my wife and kids are asleep that I sort of fall into the rhythm of what I'm trying to make happen.
My recent effort I took up in July, I think. I throw down 12-15,000 word chunks over a span of a day or three, and I work on short stories and one-pagers for an hour at a time, maybe 4 or 5 times a week, in between going back.
I also fell into a Murakami spell in the early Fall. I read AD, Windup Bird, NW, and Kafka. Then a very infantile version of his writing style started showing up in my work, and I got around 20,000 good words on another project I started to sort of channel that output before settling down and coming back to the primary goal.
About content, it's always different for me. Isolation is often a theme for me, though. I love the allegory. And the consequences of violence and tragedy are elements I often try to underplay for a sort of running effect. It's like in Blood Meridian where McCarthy tells you the game in the first few chapters, and by mid-book, there's nothing you won't buy into.
I don't know. Just me. Good thread, though. Good luck to all of you, gentlemen. Someone has to write books in the future. It might as well be us. But keep fighting that charred and smoking son a bitch the French call procrastination. It's a mean one.
