Making it into a kind of game
School is closed today for the second day in a row.

My current hard limit (H) is 300 words. This is my daily word count. Very modest. Let's make it into a game, shall we? It will be an RPG and I will try to level up.

Each day I must write H. People usually say that the writer should stop immediately on reaching H, even in the middle of a sentence if necessary. But I will institue a soft limit, or S. S is always equal to H plus fifty. This gives me a little bit of wiggle room and an extra, bonus goal to reach each day. (Today I cheated--I wrote four hundred thirty-four words, but it was an accident.)

Here's how I level up: H is increased by fifty if I have met H fourteen days in a row. So far, every day that I write, I meet H, but there have been missed days. But right now I'm level one, 300H. Soon I will be level two and have to write 350H. If I miss day then I'm automatically knocked down one level. So, in the future, when I'm level five and writing five hundred words a day, and I miss a day, then I'm knocked down to level four and will be writing a mimimum of 450 and a maximum of 500.

I have to reign myself in. If I try to spend all day Saturday and Sunday writing a thousand, immo two thousand words, I'll overextend myself. And the stories need their own time and space to grow and develop and live as they are written.

For when a story has been completed, then it is dead.