A Bit of a Continuation, Featuring a 1-10 Mini Challenge-y Thing

So on Thursday, I brought you My Own Take on the A-to-Z Blog Challenge. Well, I started to add the following on as a mini-add-on, figuring it’d be short and easy enough. Then it got long – as my writing is wont to do. So I decided to make it its very own post. Hopefully it’ll be a little educational and a little entertaining – it was certainly a little fun to compile. 🙂 I’m going to jump right into it with the actual segue I had when it was part of last week’s A-to-Z post – which may look a little odd here, but it was intended to be an add-on and by god I figured I’d leave it as such. Intent is important, you know. Trust me. I’m a lawyer. 😉

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AND, if you act now, I will throw in this BONUS 1-10 Mini Post Challenge ABSOLUTELY FREE!! Call now – operators are standing by… (Sorry for channeling old infomercials there, but I’ve always wanted to say that and never really have a legitimate reason. Teehee. The 1-10 is a thing Boy-Child and sometimes have to tack on to the alphabet when School Bus Driver is late. Just so you know.)

The Jill-Elizabeth 1-10 BONUS Mini Post Challenge
(no fanfare – or purchase – necessary)

1. is the number of characters I have to finish in the Work-in-Progress before I can move on, and that one is kicking my butt… I’m getting sick of him, and I feel badly about that, because I like him. But his story needs to wrap up. It weighs in at a ridiculously hefty number of pages – way more than the book will support – and he needs to stop talking in my head so the others can have a chance to be heard.
2. is the number of computers I write on every day. Seriously. A laptop and a desktop. They sit side-by-side. I always intend to do *real* writing on the desktop, at the desk, and leave email and the blog and other miscellany (what a great word!) to the laptop. It doesn’t always work that way though, and I have an unfortunate tendency to torque my poor back into bizarre contortions while typing through an idea on the laptop. I have an equally unfortunate tendency to procrastinate by playing some variant of Fishdom (my latest favorite distraction) on the mega-screen of the desktop. Sigh. Some day I’ll stop procrastinating, honest… (teehee)
3. is the number of blog posts I am committed to publishing per week.  One is always a book review; two are random agglomerations of thoughts that pop into my head and insist on forcing their way out.
4. is the number of cups of coffee I have burned through so far in writing this.  This marks today as a fairly typical day.  I never used to drink copious amounts of coffee, mind you.  I was a committed Diet Coke drinker – it was my nearly exclusive source of caffeine.  I had the occasional cup of coffee after a good meal or on a particularly cold day, but generally speaking I didn’t drink it regularly.  Since I got married, I’ve become an obsessive coffee drinker.  You see, The Husband is an obsessive coffee drinker who will drink any swill coffee that is put before him.  I, on the other hand, am a woman of discriminating tastes.  I can only drink good coffee brewed from freshly ground beans.  (Yes, I am also a bit of a princess.)  If I want any coffee ever, I must shop for it and make it – else I will be forced to drink swill also. The Husband has to have coffee every morning or he is The Grumpus.  I make coffee every morning to prevent The Grumpus from appearing.  Since I have to make it, I might as well make what I like.  Ergo, since I have taken the time to make it, I now also drink the coffee.  WOW – that was a long and involved (and likely very dull) tale about coffee.  Sorry.  Teehee.  The next couple will be shorter, promise.
5. is the number of main characters in my Work In Progress, and the maximum number of extended-version voices I seem to be able to balance in my head at one time.
6. is the number of volumes the WIP is going to have to be published in if the characters don’t start cooperating and limit their individual parts of the overall story into a manageable number of words.  An author I severely enjoy recently referred to this as “story creep” – teehee, given some of my characters, “creep” is the perfect adjective…  I love when word play happens unwittingly.
7. thousand is the maximum number of thousands of words I’ve ever written in a day.  That was a great day.  I’ve never since managed to get that high, although I did hit almost 5,000 one day last week.
8. a.m. is the usual time that you can find a fresh Jill-Elizabeth.com blog post, on one of the regularly scheduled post days.  (I know, this one was a little lame, but I couldn’t come up with anything better…)
9. (out of 13) is the number of months (since I started keeping track) that I did not meet my fiction writing goal.  Eek, she said.  Of course, in that time I also got engaged, married, bought a house, moved two kids into said new house, sold a house, took a honeymoon, put another house up for sale, renovated a basement/bathroom, wrote hundreds of blog posts and tens of thousands of words that didn’t count.  I’m doing better with the goal-reaching lately though, thank goodness, and ever since I expanded the goal, have actually maxed out over the expansion number every month.  So I’m finally on track!
10. is the number of short stories I’d like to organize into my first short-story collection, but I’m not sure if that’s enough.  I don’t buy a lot of short stories, so don’t know how long the “average” collection is.  But the whole point of short stories is quick-burst reads, and it seems to me that the people who want quick-burst reads would want their books to be relatively low-commitment objects – especially if published as an e-book, which I’m considering.  Thoughts??