Some More Observations On Writing

Introduction

I get a weekly email telling me how I have performed on Grammarly. I’m told I have been using it for over a year but I am sure it has been longer. My friend Call Me Les suggested that I use it as my work is often full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, although that was when I was writing pieces using voice-to-text when I was out walking, something I now only use for basic ideas.

There was an image stating I had reached a goal and some mentions of how Mark Twain would always write a thousand words a day, and Stephen King writes two thousand words a day.

So About My Writing

Today I posted a short blog post on Seven Days In (you can read by clicking the site name) although I don’t really post there much any more, maybe one or two posts a month usually documenting the book that I am currently reading.

My Vocal writing is an entirely different kettle of fish.

In 21 months on Vocal I have written over 1050 articles, 450 of which have been poems, some collected in anthologies on Amazon which would not have happened without Vocal. My poems probably average around two hundred words per article so that is ninety thousand words in the poetry community and say maybe eight hundred words for everything else that is around half a million words there. I do not think anyone apart from myself will ever read all my work.

This image of Margaret Hamilton shows her standing against the code she wrote to put men on the moon.

Most of my code was written in COBOL , though I have used various forms of BASIC, FORTRAN, HTML, SQL, PHP, JAVA and maybe I have forgotten about but I am not sure if I wrote that much. I do smirk when I watch Jurassic Park and see the guy going on about his million lines of code, when most of it would have been machine generated. Machine generated code always bothers me, but I do use it to initially generate code then manually amend it to do what I require (I am a very lazy coder and writer).

The piece below was an attempt to write two thousand words in a day on Seven Days In when I was on holiday in Craster, though I think now that this was definitely a case of quantity over quality.

My average since I started on Vocal is maybe two stories a day, assuming one article and one poem that is maybe a thousand words so I am in Mark Twain territory not Stephen King, though they are both writers that I admire.

Inspiration

I am extremely lucky in that I can be inspired to write by so many things, like that Grammarly email for this piece, but I am inspired to write poetry by so many people, places and events and sometimes feel I could just keep writing poems but then part of me tells me I am being lazy and I need to write some fiction or a piece like this.

I know my friends and audience would miss my poems if I dropped them but I do feel that I have to continually look for different things and areas to write about so that people don’t see a post of mine and think “Oh no not another whatever”.

Conclusion

I hope this gives people ideas for their own writing as well as an insight into what I do on a daily basis to share my thoughts with you.

I thought I'd include "Proud Mary" by Creedence Clearwater Revival because the "Rollin' On A River" seems appropriate for any artist or creator.