Thursday, February 25, 2010

Challenge

Hi Everyone,

I've been told by the author of How Many Licks? to spread the word on an online contest he's holding. Details found here:

http://diaryofnumbers.blogspot.com/2010/02/fermi-contest-ii.html

I'm also curious as to what kind of solutions people come up with. Seriously, how many times has the video game character Mario died in his adventures?

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Congratulations to a friend of mine for getting her articles on David Bowie and Eleanor of Aquitaine published! The more people click on these links, the more she gets paid, so get to it:

http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/186/innovation-or-desperation-david-bowies-little-wonder

http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/187/the-uncommon-commonality-of-eleanor-of-aquitaine

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I've been reading up on typical work-output of some authors, as in how much and how fast they write.

Neil Gaiman wrote in a tweet:
"@tesharasox an okay writing day on a novel is 1000 words plus. 2000 is an excellent day. More is a great day. "Stephen King (in On Writing) tells fiction writers to aim for a target of 1,000 words a day, six days a week."

In this article, Hemingway was recorded as saying:
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

The second paragraph of Charles Bukowski's Women (page one) reads:
"I'm not sure when I first saw Lydia Vance. It was about 6 years ago and I had just quit a twelve year job as a postal clerk and was trying to be a writer. I was terrified and drank more than ever. I was attempting my first novel. I drank a pint of whiskey and two six packs of beer each night while writing. I smoked cheap cigars and typed and drank and listened to classical music on the radio until dawn. I set a goal of ten pages a night but I never knew until the next day how many pages I had written. I'd get up in the morning, vomit, then walk to the front room and look on the couch to see how many pages were there. I always exceeded my ten. Sometimes there were 17, 18, 23, 25 pages. Of course, the work of each night had to be cleaned up or thrown away. It took me twenty-one nights to write my first novel."

*Granted, Bukowski is writing as reoccurring character Henry Chinaski. Still, if it's even remotely based on fact, I find it to be amazing.*

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So, writers out there. How much do you challenge yourself to write each day?

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