People write in all sorts of ways. Some people binge write, putting words down at amazing clips until a project is done and taking time off in between projects. Other people write a steady amount every day, or every weekday, or every weekend. It’s all different.

I’ve been trying for the past couple of years to get to the point where I can write steadily. My goal has been to write 1000 words each day. I wrote 2000 words a day while working on Shattered, but I often found I had to push myself for several hours to get it done when it wasn’t working for me. But 1000, I can do that without too much angst if I can stay off of the Twitter and Skype and Messenger (I like my friends).

I have a large number of projects I want to write. If I wrote 1000 words each day, it would take me nearly ten years to complete them all. I’m fine with that, to be honest. Over time, some projects will drop off the list, but I’ll have others that I add to it.

But, I’ve also acquired a bug for writing shorter pieces. There’s a completion high that I get whenever I finish something. It never lasts very long, but I like it. When writing shorter pieces, I get that boost more often.

There’s a problem with that, though. In order to write the shorter pieces in my normal 1000 words a day that I’ve been doing, I had thought it would impact the number of my novel projects that I could write, and I really didn’t want to do that.

So I tried something else this week.

I decided I’d write 1000 words on my novels in the morning, and then I’d write 1000 words on short fiction in the afternoon/evening.

And what do you know, it seems to work brilliantly. For me. For the first three days. I get to work on everything I want to, and I don’t feel overwhelmed by any part of it. I don’t feel overwhelmed by the length of the novel staring me in the face because, well, today is only 1000 words, and I know in a few days I’ll have a short story finished.

It’s been three days. I know there’s a very real chance that this won’t work long term, but in the short term I’m writing 2400 words each day and not feeling stressed about it at all. And if it continues, the novels will come out when I want them to, and I’ll have a bunch of shorts, as well.