Two (hundred) crappy pages

This is it, the 100th post. It’d be great if I could end on a high note. Instead, this post will be a microcosm of the other 99. It’s going to be a hodgepodge.

I’m writing some of it longhand. How do some voice dictation1. I’ll write on the bus. I’ll write in the morning. I’ll write at a park somewhere on the way home. I’ll finish on my laptop and post it tonight2.

I wanted to have stats like total word count, cups of coffee consumed, where I wrote most often, and other meta things like that. Then I realized that’ll take more time than I have free today. I’ll even have a book excerpt. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield talks about finishing his first novel:

But that moment when I first hit the keys to spell out THE END was epochal. I remember rolling the last page out and adding it to the stack that was the finished manuscript. Nobody knew I was done. Nobody cared. But I knew.

Nobody cares. But I care. Right now, I’m high stepping into the end zone. The game breakdown can start after I’m actually finished. You know what, we can start some of that now.

“He’s got a short memory. Bad page after bad page. Miss after miss he just kept at it.”

“Scrappy.”

“He looked gassed at the end. Started paying more attention to the clock than to the blank page in front of him.”

“He lowered his “I Think” Rate through the season but barely moved the needle on Good Sentences Per Page.”

“Voice dictation got to his head. Ditched the old putter for some kind of belly stick and hasn’t learned to use it properly yet.”

“A specimen. His spine is perfectly fit to hunch into a chair for hours.”

“Deceptively quick.”

“Got a few minutes of access to him in the locker room. He just kept saying he heard different things on podcasts.”

Nobody knew Pressfield had finished his first novel. At least for one night. There aren’t trophies for everything, but you can at least relish in telling the neighbor.

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.”

Tomorrow, I’ll reward myself with another blank page.

  1. (I’ll do some voice dictation.)

  2. Update: I ended up skipping the park. I wrote a little bit on the subway, which is just as representative of places I wrote during the past few months. And I’m currently finishing up on my laptop.