I’m not a social person. In fact, if not for years of playing team sports, I’d probably have the social skills of a sea slug. Due to my social inadequacies, I hate being trapped in situations, like having my hair cut, when I’m forced to talk to someone. Invariably, I’m forced to talk about something which I don’t care to discuss, and I don’t like to lie to avoid uncomfortable topics.

            Last year, however, I was forced into one of these uncomfortable situations in which there was no escape. After a foot injury, I chose to see a physical therapist to assist me in learning to walk again. Naturally, this required talking to someone for at least an hour a day, three times a week. Now, I’m not without conversational skills. I just don’t like to talk about most the things nosy people want to know. I get tasking about my life and they look at me as if I have lobsters crawling out of my ears. They don’t believed me. They find it hard to swallow that my father was the vice-chairman of Ford Motor Company. That I grew up in Mexico City, and I played football at Purdue University. The real sticker … The one I hate the most … is when they ask what I do for a living. Telling people that I’m a writer leads to all sorts of stupid, often insulting, questions like:

Question: Have you written anything I might have read?

Answer: I have no idea what you read or even if you even can read.

Question: When did you start writing?

Answer: I scratched out my first novella on the walls of my mother’s womb. It wasn’t worthy of publication, however, and got tossed out with the rest of the afterbirth.

Question (My personal favorite, and the one I find most insulting): Where do you get your ideas?

Answer: About ten years ago, I was abducted by these pudgy, purple aliens that vaguely resembled Barney. They claimed they were from Zoltron-14, and they wanted me to spread their literary works here on Earth. So about once a year, they contact me through a transmitter they implanted in my head and give me their latest idea.

Normally, people are put off by my sarcasm after the first question, and never ask any more. But this physical therapist I saw couldn’t be deterred. He was like my demented mother and kept asking the same question.” How many words do you write a day?”

This is something I’ve considered often, so it didn’t take much to come up with a truthful answer. My first goal is to write every day. Writers who say they don’t have time to write everyday have their priorities screwed up. But I don’t set out each morning with a specific word count in mind. I always laugh when I see writers tweeting that hey wrote 10,000 words that day. Good for them. 10,000 words of what? My dog could probably walk around on my keyboard and come up with 10,000 words of gibberish, too. In fact, I think that’s how I wrote my first book. I sat down and just wrote as much as I could each day. The end result was 140,000 words of crap, but miraculously a publisher picked it up on the first try.

Now that I’ve written ten more books, my writing is somewhat more structured and thoughtful. I might not have a word count in mind when I start each day, but I definitely have a specific point which will advance my story that I want to make each day. Day by day I make my points, advancing my story while never worrying whether I’ve written 10 or 10,000 words. As long as I advance my story in an entertaining, grammatically-correct manner, the daily word count is unimportant to me.

As I finish my writing each day, I always write a little more just to ensure that the next point I’m going to make is properly set up for the next day. Then, after pondering that point throughout the rest of the day, I’m ready to jump right in the next morning.

I never worry about the word count until it starts to near my desired total, somewhere around 80,000-100,000 words. By then I can only hope that all my intertwining points are drawing toward their desired culmination, or I’m going to be doing some serious editing and cutting … something I intensely dislike doing.

In my opinion, someone who is setting daily word count goals, is someone who hasn’t thought out their story, and doesn’t know what they want to write. Either that, or they don’t care about what you want to read.

But my physical therapist never bought this theory, so the next day he’d ask, “How many words do you write a day?”