I have been climbing back out from a very bad week.
Someone killed my cat, just ran him over and never stopped. We were out looking for him already, and had just passed that way. We saw the body in the road as we headed back. His heart was still beating when I touched him, but not for long. I scooped up his body, and we hid it from the children in the shed. We buried him the next day, and planted a cherry tree.
I drive a lot, and I like driving. I like the solitude, and illusion of freedom. At the same time, perversely, I hate what cars have done to us. One day we (or our children) will look back on this time and be amazed that we gave up so much for the automobile. We gutted entire cities, we conjured death on a biblical scale, we stretched out life so thin that every journey seems unthinkable without a vehicle.
When we occasionally had to walk, we found the prospect so unpleasant, and our legs so atrophied, that we bought ourselves little invalid carriages. They’re everywhere, fat people on mobility carts, driving around and buying things and drinking milk based beverages. At least cats can outrun them, I suppose. (I know there are plenty of genuinely disabled people for whom these vehicles are a boon.. I’m ranting here, OK?)
So then I started sneezing and got the chills.
And the writing angle? Well thank god for wordcount targets. It’s not that making my daily wordcount got me through a bad week. Beer, books, and rationed doses of good TV helped a lot with that too (Sons of Anarchy, Stargate Universe, Mad Men, Rubicon, Caprica, Spooks. We’re spoiled this fall).
No, it’s just that having a wordcount target kept me writing. I didn’t produce my best work. In fact I’m sick of this story. It was going to be a quick one week exercise and it’s now eating up months. But I’m determined to finish. Because otherwise I’ll never finish anything. My wordcount target kept the project alive.. a thin thread of work laid out through the week, and forward I hope into better times.
It’s dangerous of course. You can come to rely on this metric to the extend that just making your target is more important than actually doing good work, or finishing anything. I’ll probably return to that topic. But for now, I’m just grateful I kept working, and I still have a story on the boil.
