Lightning Strikes

Don’t you love it when you’re writing, and lightning strikes?

Yeah, me, too.

Happened yesterday. A writing lightning strike is when I assume the position to write, and dictation begins. My job is only to keep up with the typing.

I track word counts as an incidental measure of progress. These are *almost* like the miles being traveled while on a trip. In a car, I generally know exactly where I’m going and how much I have left because I travel across a well-measured and documented region. Detailed maps are available. I know how far I’ve gone, and what distance remains.

I’d love to have such a map for my novel writing. I don’t. Word counts present an idea of how far I’ve gone, but little idea of how much further I must travel in the novel. In the end, all that matters I’ve typed and written until I finally type “The End”.

Word counts help me gauge what’s normal and inject some minor reward and satisfaction. Yesterday, I ended up with twenty-six hundred more words on my novel journey. Some writers may poo-poo that amount – and I’m not pursuing N2WM – but it’s higher than my average. Best, though, I completed three chapters being concurrently developed. In essence, they were part of a sequence of events. I wrote them in order, but as details developed, I backtracked to modify and align details and the timeline. Best, number two, is that completing them left me with a starting location for today. Best, number three, is that satisfaction of bringing more to the story and moving toward the novel’s completion.

Will lightning strike twice? I offer the late Roy Sullivan as evidence it could. Roy, a park ranger, was struck by lightning and lived seven times, and is the Guinness World Records official record-holder for those categories.

Time to write like crazy, at least one…more…time.