Writer Wednesday

Ever heard the 10.000-hours-practice theory and the “write 1million words of crap before getting better“? Just out of curiosity I decided to try to calculate how many words I’ve written in English (since 2001) – it’s impossible to calculate how many in Italian because most of them are still handwritten on notebooks, but you can easily guess that what I did in 25 years is surely more than what I could do in 12. So I added the wordcount of the books I’ve published on Smashwords (easy because they’re all on one page and the wordcount is there – I didn’t count short stories that are included in anthologies and the “double bill” are included once. And I rounded the numbers and excluded the Italian titles.), the screenplays (not all, I’m afraid the first are lost to some hard disk misfunction and I didn’t bother check my back-up disks) and the blog posts (because that’s still writing, folks!).

Being math challenged I had to use a calculator, anyway, here’s what I came up with: Smashwords grand total 983000 words (so that’s already close to the million – and I started publishing in 2011, 10 years after I started writing in English); screenplays: 133300 words (yep, they’re shorter. I stopped writing them because I’m a control freak! ); blog posts – I considered 500 words a day posted daily for 27 months (Oct.2009-Dec.2011) + 1000 words Wed-Fri-Sun for 15 months (Jan.2012-Feb.2013): 640000 words. Grand total is 1.756.300 (I repeat, I’m math challenged to the point that I might have copied the results wrong…).

Writing is a muscle, if you don’t excercise it – and do it starting small, again habit vs motivation – you won’t get better. You’ll always have writer’s block or won’t know what to write next. I don’t know what writer’s block is. For me it’s such an ingrained habit, I’ve just started to actually counting how many words I produce. Like for the body switch I know I wrote 21000 words in 8 days. I might not earn my living yet, but I’m definitely a writer, not an author.

And the writer finally managed to publish another title (that’s because the previous ones were in Italian, that’s why I didn’t announce them here, but I usually publish something every other week)! Ladies and gentlemen, The Death of Queen Amazonia is finally live on Smashwords, Kindle and Kobo! And here’s the final cover for your eyes only.

The Kindle version unfortunately doesn’t have the internal illustration of Smeraldo and Kyrio I already uploaded on this blog, but the Smashwords and Kobo files have it. I’m so happy My Books on Kindle are all Smashwords files! On XinXii and DriveThruFiction, the mobi file has no inside picture, but the PDF and e-pub do.

I’ll leave you with the usual writerly links. Krish Rusch on the death of publishing – or not. About Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success – something we can all relate to!

Aaand – last but not least – it’s Smashwords Ebook Week again, so check the great deals from Unicorn Productions! Some titles have gone free, the rest is 50% off (including the new release) – only until Sunday!

And I’m not the only one doing the sale – check Mighty Joleene Naylor’s sale and if you’re an adult looking for a vampire story, don’t miss her Amaranthine series that starts with Shades of Gray which has nothing to do with 50… and it’s free for the week!

Or, if you’d like to try some gay erotic fantasy (paranormal with demons from what I could gather from his blog), try Ciaran Dwinvyl. He’s already on my wishlist, but I might just grab the opportunity and get his books with 50%off…

Look for more e-book deals on Smashwords… Have a wonderful week!