Just an Hour a Week

This is a day that the Lord hath made.
Let us rejoice and write stories in it.

— Sharon Lippincott

I've had a busy week. Our daughter was here for Thanksgiving with her toddler and husband, and shortly after they left, I came down with a bug (fortunately short-lived). Consequently, I haven't spent time writing for a week now. This could have been a disaster for the blog, but fortunately I had a small backlog that I could pop into place with a few clicks of my mouse. My backlog is now depleted, but it won't stay that way long. I woke up with my head simply buzzing with blog/story ideas.

Knowing all too well how important it is to honor my muse Sarabelle when she pays me a visit, especially such a bountiful one, I headed straight to my computer and started half a dozen new posts. If my backlog gets too full, I'll simply post more often for awhile.

One of the insights she gifted me with was the fact that I now have ninety-four posts in this blog, which began on February 7, 2006, less than ten months ago. That's an average of approximately one post every three days. The posts average 407 words. A page of normally formatted text (Times Roman Font, 12 point, normal line spacing, one-inch margins all around) will average around 660 words per page. A page following my recommended formatting* with a wider typeface like Georgia (used in this blog), 11 point, with 15 point line spacing and one-inch margins all around will average about 550 words per page, 500 with chapter titles and section headers. Given these statistics, the current contents of this blog would fill about 80 pages with my recommended formatting.

I seldom spent more than twenty minutes per post, sometimes less, so I wrote about an hour a week on this blog. In about forty weeks I've written and edited around eighty pages of text, spending only an hour a week doing it. That's two pages per week, or about one hundred pages a year.

Just think what you can do if you write just an hour a week for, let's say, ten years! Even if you write at half the speed I do, you'll have an amazing stack of pages. Now, isn't that news enough to get those fingers clicking? Rejoice and ...

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

* Full details on this recommended formatting and how to use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Write or WordPerfect to make it happen are included in my soon-to-be-released book, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. Stay tuned for ordering information.