I wrote twenty-two pages today (or on 9 June, the day just ended), completing exactly a third of what remained to be done on the book at this time yesterday.

For the first time in an extremely long time, I have more days till the deadline than sections of the book left to write. The book has eighty sections, which are not quite long enough to be considered chapters. By comparison to American Dream On, that book holds sixty chapters in 135,000 words. This will have eighty sections in about 100,000 words. So you get the distinction.

I was reading a little about the torrid end to my writing of ADO, largely to see if June was surpassing December of last year in productivity. It’s not, though it must be said that it’s getting competitive. I’ve written 24,288 words in the 9 days of June so far, which equates to 97 pages by the conventional rubric and is nearly 11 pages a day on average. Now of course I was just posting about being elated to average nearly 6 pages a day over 40 days, so you can see how much of that average is getting its steam from just the last week and change. Given that I took nearly two full days off this month, the average for productive days is arguably closer to 14 pages a day. Suddenly my 22-page day isn’t seeming so special.

As far as parsing the reasons for these spurts, it’s hard to discern between deadline motivation and the natural energy that comes from the converging end of a book. At this point, I’m trying not to analyze it too heavily because it just works for me. I’m not going to argue with the results. And my doubts about the quality that can be maintained at this pace have been allayed by the fact that most everyone felt the December-written chapters of ADO were the best therein.

I guess the only question, going into my fourth book when the time comes this fall, is how to maintain this kind of frenzy throughout writing a book. Is it even possible? If it were, I could write maybe five books a year and they’d all be spectacular. But I bet there’s something unique about the close of the tomes that makes this an unsustainable state of mind and work.

It’s amazing to realize that one really is capable of the things one thinks one is capable of.