How Do You Eat an Elephant?

One bite at a time, kids. One bite at a time.

Yes, I'm mangling a quote by Creighton Abrams, but the sentiment applies to many aspects of life, including writing.

The thought was prompted when Dean Wesley Smith posted that he'd written 4.5 million words over the last three years. (No, those are not typos.) A lot of newer writers were flabbergasted by that amount.

They're looking at the entire elephant, and they're already gagging at the thought of eating such an enormous beast. And that's a self-defeating way of looking at things because Dean is looking at his total output, i.e. fiction, non-fiction, teaching, e-mails, etc.

While I won't pretend to be in Dean's league, here's an idea of what I've written in the last three days:

- 3132 fiction words. That's scattered across two novels and an Alter Ego novella. And frankly, it's negative words for Ravaged because I ripped out a chunk from Alyson's POV that wasn't working.

- 3000 e-mail words. Actually it's probably more than that because I only included the three friends I've e-mailed with the most.

- 600 blog words.

- 300 promotion words. An anthology that contains one of Alter Ego's short stories came out a few days early, so I needed to do some promotions for it yesterday that I'd planned to do today.

That's roughly 7032 words in just three days (2344 per day), and I haven't been focused on working on my fiction because of a series of family-related things.

Or in other words, if I keep that token 2344 words per day pace, in 365 days, I would have 855,560 words. And in three years, I'd have 2,566,680 words.

All those words by eating one tiny bite of the elephant at a time.