A Splintered Mind

I'm depressed today, so I will be listening to Christmas music mixed with dance music to lift my spirits. Videos that I watched last night still haunt me. I especially haven't recovered from watching an avant-garde biopic of Karen Carpenter done with grime, war footage, and Barbie dolls. I may never be free from its hateful snark. Thanks, IRC guy, for the recommendation. If I had only left it alone. I could have walked away, shaking my head, but unscarred. However, I then looked up “Karen Carpenter collapsed on stage” and watched final performances of hers where she looked like a poster child for third world hunger while smiling & singing. I saw interviews with her in complete denial. Then she was “suddenly” dead because of complications from anorexia nervosa. Yeah, the IRC guy's getting coal this year from me. That artsy documentary was horrible, but I also didn't need this distraction. I was freshly sixteen at the time, so I don't recall how I felt about K...

Today I was reading an article by Dean Wesley Smith about Pulp Speed . He talked about the golden age of pulp fiction where writers who were disciplined could write 1,000,000 words a year or more. That's only 2778 words per day he calculated, working everyday of the month. Of course, you might want to take the weekend off, so subtracting four Sundays & Saturdays from a thirty day month would mean you'd need to write 3788 words per day to get the same results. At 1000 words an hour, that's just under four hours of work daily—part time status. If you doubled that and worked an eight hour day, you'd double your output to 2,000,000 words a year—the equivalent of twenty 100,000 word books a year. The trick to the numbers, however, is that each book would have NO REWRITING. They'd all be submitted as first drafts. Apparently, you'd also do no research or plotting. You'd just sit down and wing it. Just the idea of that level of output & confidence is sta...