I suspect that this decision is based more on OCD ("oh, look ... something that I have to do every day!") than on any particular benefit I'm getting from it - so far at least. There are people who insist that it's "as good as" meditation or therapy, but I'm not feeling it ... but things are so horrible in my life at the moment that maybe nothing short of heroin would make me feel better. I did set up a spreadsheet where I track my words-per-minute, with 10-day averages and on-going averages, my time-to-750-words, with similar tracking, and my words-written-per-day, also with a 10-day average and a total-total (in case you're wondering, I'm so far over-all averaging 35.61 WPM, 21.39 minutes to 750 words, and have rung up a total of 27,879 words).
Although the concept of doing "morning pages" has been delightfully described as "having a cup of coffee with your Jungian Shadow", I keep wondering if I could channel this into something productive ... perhaps working on a book, bit by bit by bit. After all, the "usual" length of a non-fiction book tends to run 75-100k words, so I'd (since the first of May) already have been ⅓-¼ of the way to having a book done by now (and if I'd just doubled my writing time, I'd have made the 50,000 word count for NaNoWriMo)! I was sort of inspired by a (humorist) writer I recently heard speak who noted of his latest book that "some of those chapters barely took me 20 minutes to write" ... if I could start generating at least the seeds of interesting contemplations each morning, I could end up spewing out book after book after book of my mental ruminations ... which, thanks to Create Space, I could actually foist on the world at large (and, after all, they couldn't sell any worse than my poetry collections!).
Oh, and speaking of things Create Spacy ... it looks like I'm going to be down at the Printers Row Lit Fest this weekend. As an IWOC (Independent Writers of Chicago) member, I was able to "get in on" a table (for just $10!) co-sponsored by IWOC and CWIP (Chicago Women in Publishing) that will be in the IWPA (Illinois Woman’s Press Association) tent (located in the middle of Dearborn Street, the seventh tent north of Polk Street). I ordered 14 copies of The Common Book of Witchcraft and Wicca (which I did the layout, design, basic editing, etc. on for the Witchschool.com guys) to sell (I'll do some fliers for the poetry ... no use spending money on printing those until I have a paying customer!), so if you were hankering for a copy of that, but wanted to paw through a sample copy before committing to it - you can come by the tent and have at it!
