After an interesting discussion with some of my colleagues over lunch, I have a new writing goal. Currently I'm revising a project that I hope will be publishable soon (I've been challenged to try and get something in print before I'm 30, start of 2011); I'm happy with the structure, the plot and most of the characterisation so I'm mostly doing a sweep for style, clarity and general errors, for which I'm just keeping a mark in the file indicating which text I've already looked at.

The target is to move that marker up by at least 10,000 words a week. For the sake of letting readers here judge me and make me feel guilty, I'm going to post numbers every now and again.

Before today: 14,219 words, 564 paragraphs.
During this session: 16,134 words, 843 paragraphs.

I'm a tiny bit concerned about how quickly this is going: it turns out that with my mind to it I can chew through several thousand words an hour. It's not that I'm not making changes, although I am finding that I'm mostly happy with what's already there. That's encouraging considering it's been quite a while since I looked at this; it's definitely much better than anything I wrote before it.
Ultimately I'm confident that although my edit isn't changing much it's not because I'm not being thorough, rather that the text doesn't have many flaws that I would be able to see. I'm necessarily blind to some things (whether twists are surprising being the best example), which is why it's great that I've got some offers of reading from some people who I can count on to spot different kinds of things and give me decent feedback on them.

Well, 10,000 was an arbitrary number and if it starts to feel easy I'll raise it.

My thanks to my colleague whose current challenge is Script Frenzy and the other who has committed to producing short stories on a timetable to practice his writing discipline. And to the one who challenged me to get published...

(I'm so glad to be working with these people, and others like them)