SHOPKEEP News

Author Hits Key Numerological Milestone

A quick post to let everyone know that Shopkeep’s daily word-count rests comfortably at 44,420. Sounds like a good stopping point for now; sounds like time for a refreshing break. At this rate I’ll have the draft in another month or so.

Now if the sun will come back out here in dreary, wintery (by our standards) South-Cack, I’ll be all set. After getting two major projects squared away in the quiet, cold season, I’ll be ready to dive head-first back into gardening, yard and woodworking projects. My years of typing out symbolic figures on paper, words standing in for base reality experiences, have left me ready to do different work with my arthritic hands than typing with furious abandon for hours on end.

Hours of furious typing are the way a writer ‘gets there’, however. I had a half-million words under my belt before I ever published anything. Word to the aspirational—most of it was shit. And had to be done.

Writing about my years of struggle, like much of Shopkeep and MoHG, is exhausting. Don’t get me wrong—I love the writing life. But these two ultra-personal projects are taking it out of me emotionally and physically. Once they are done, it’s back to poetry. My little cut-up and channeled stanzas are much less weighty and fraught than these memoir-ish manuscripts.

Eh, it’s fine. I’m having fun with it. Relieving tragedies here and there, but I’ve been at that for decades. As I posted the other day, this run of peak dmac writing time has been mostly joyous—it’s not even 7am and I have my work done for the day, as well this blog update. It’s a freaking celebration, here.

That’s my advice—if you can, make every day a celebration. You never know when they will end.