Crisis of confidence

Six episodes down, about thirty more to go.

The six episodes of Committed posted, if you can trust the Open Office word count function, represent about 12,000 words so far. And if I keep going with the same format, there's about 60,000 words left to go. Counting my notes, outlines, and ideas, I've got probably a tenth of that already written.

I don't know how many people know this, but a lot of this novel is being written on the fly. An odd concept, perhaps, but one that works for me. I've been saying I was going to write a novel for some twenty years now. Apparently it takes having a weekly deadline for me to actually get it done.

I have to be honest here. The numbers to this point (if you can believe Google Analytics, and you better, because everyone else does) are, to be sure, disappointing. Very few people are reading Committed right now. Hell, I can't even get my daughter (who reads anything and everything she can get her hands on) to look at it.

I think there are a number of reasons for this. The first is marketing. I've done very little apart from emailing all my friends and asking them to read what I wrote. Another may be the concept itself. Is an online novel is just an online novelty? A third could be the actual writing itself. The first six episodes have been mainly expository, dealing with character development and setting.

But instead of getting depressed, I keep writing. I've got some ideas about marketing the piece, and there very well may be an A.R. Kirby myspace page in the near future. And the story is about to get seriously strange, and (I hope) funny. And if I write it and promote it, they will come.

I've waited twenty years to do this. I'm not going to let Google Analytics stop me now.