IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Due to the murder of my family and the resulting court cases, police investigations, and FBI investigations, I no longer have time to daily update this website.

Likewise ALL novel, short story, and article writing projects are on hiatus.

All book releases, book signings, workshops, and convention appearances for 2015 (and unknown amount of time after) are on hold while the murder investigation of my family is ongoing.

Writing advice for the worldbuilding, character creation, and other writing how to articles are on hold.

From now on, the bulk of updates here will be about the investigation into the murder of my family.

No, NOT just THIS author website, not JUST the EelKat pename, not just self published books: ALL 15 (fifteen) of my penames are on hiatus, that includes traditional published books as well, newspaper reporting jobs, editing jobs, my work for Harlequin Romance Novels, my work for Disney... EVERYTHING is on hiatus. Every publishing house I work for, every series I write, every penname I write under: they are ALL on hiatus, ALL projects.

There is NOTHING being published under ANY penname, not for ANY series, not for ANY publisher, from 2015 onward. EVERYTHING is on hold due to the murder of my family. I do not know when or even if, any of the projects will be restarted or finished.

Yes, BOTH the magazines I owned are indefinitely shut down because of this as well, with no plans for either magazine to return. The publishing house I own is also closed to submissions from now on, we will no longer be publishing anything. It is unlikely we will reopen the publishing house either.

All book signing tours, workshops, letures, PAX events, ComicCon events, carnival/festival/state fair/car show events are also canceled. I will not be attending ANY of them. If a venue still has my name listed as a guest/speaker/etc it is because they've not yet removed it. I WILL NOT be there, no matter where it is! 

EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, IS CANCELED!

The ONLY thing continuing from this point on, is THIS website, where I'll post updates on the murder investigation, hopefully every week, but, you know how it is when 10 members of your family are beheaded, it's kind of difficult to have a schedule for anything anymore.

Average Typing Speed

Average Typing Speed: Answering Your Questions

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What is the average typing speed?

This question was taken from a very long email, which detailed lots of gripes and complaints about how much they hated writers who wrote too fast. Lots of bitching and moaning about the fact that they hated NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo writers, and pretty much everything to do with any author who puts out more then 1 novel every 4 years, which is what they claimed is the ONLY realistic thing possible for any writer to do.

My answer, directly answers all the points and issues they brought up over the course of their extreme bitchiness. The many paragraphs of "You type too fast!", "Cheater! No one can type that fast!" and chants of "It's my turn to shine!" have all been removed.

Normally I would add a link to the question asker's site, because I like to help new writers get their books out there, but this asker was so over the top bitchy and full of hate for everything and every one that I am not going to link my site to theirs. So, no links here, just moving straight on into answering their question...


By EelKat Wendy C Allen

Average Typing Speed: Answering Your Questions
My Answer:

I find your message somewhat baffling, though not completely unexpected. As you are very obviously a troll, I will not grace you with an answer directly, and instead will post an answer to you on my website, for every one to read. If you truly do want answers as to the average writing

The average typing speed of the average (non-career-author) person is 25 to 35 words per minute (depending on if they typed in school or not). Meaning that if they knew ahead of time EXACTLY what they wanted to write, they could sit down and type it out in about an hour and 20 minutes. However, the average (non-career-author) writer doesn't know exactly want they want to write ahead of time, which adds time to stop and think between sentences. This brings it to 2 hours more or less. 

If your average typing speed is below this, then that simply means you have no practice in typing. Only this and nothing more. Please try to remember that people who have an average typing speed of 100 to 200 words per minute are trained in typing, practice daily, exercise their figures regularly, and THAT is why their average typing speed is so much higher then yours.

It shocks and saddens me to learn that you are so much of a narrow minded bigot that you believe anything you can not do, must therefore be something no one else can do either. The world would be in a very sorry state if everyone on the planet was a carbon copy of you and could only do exactly the same things you can do. 

Can you build a TV? No? Well, I guess no one else can either.

Can you build a car engine? No? I guess no one else can either, then, if your logic is true.

When was the last time you walked on the moon? 

When was the last time you won the Super Bowl?

Honey, there's a lot of things you can not do. Keeping up with my typing speed is the least of your worries, if you were to start looking at every thing out there that you are not able to do.

Plus if it is your absolute first time attempting to write a novel, you got to remember too that the muscles in your fingers need warm up and cool down time just like any other muscles do - remember sports players don't just jump into Super Bowl - they start out with years of practice, and each practice session starts out with warm up exercises so they don't sprain a muscle and injure themselves before the big game.

If you want to increase your average typing speed, it's really easy to do, actually:

10 Steps To Increasing
Your Average Typing Speed


  • #1: Get off your lazy ass, stop bitching in my emails, and do something useful with your life instead of wasting it being a low life, scum of the earth busy-body.
  • #2: Sit at your computer, and instead of typing bitching emails, complaining that you can not compete with my average typing speed, and instead, improve your own average typing speed, by typing something useful, instead of something that wastes my time and yours.
  • #3: Type.
  • #4: Type some more.
  • #5: Type again.
  • #6: Type something else.
  • #7: Find yet another thing to type.
  • #8: Type this.
  • #9: Type that.
  • #10: Type the other thing.

Bonus Tip To Help You Increase Your Average Typing Speed:

  • #11: Repeat all of the above 10 steps tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and every day for the rest of the year.

Well, that part added in and allowing time for interruptions, it is safe to assume that for most people, it'll take a minimum 4 hours to write each 1,667 word segment of their story and possibly even longer. (And there's nothing wrong with that either, so ignore anyone who tells you you are writing too slow if you write fewer then 1,667 words a day. Yeah, it happens, it shouldn't, but it does. If it does, ignore them and keep going at your own pace. There is nothing wrong with not reaching a particular word count goal.)

My first year doing NaNo I struggled to keep up the pace. I struggled again my second year. It wasn't until my third year that I figured out a schedule that suited me.I think part of the struggles I had early on was, that I was trying to just sit down and write all at once, and was doing it without really knowing what I wanted to write and without warming up my fingers first. Which resulted in mental burnout and finger fatigue both tripping me up really bad.

Normally (the rest of the year , outside of November and NaNoWriMo) I'm a pantser and I just write here or there whenever the mood strikes. But during November, I had to sit down and write certain word counts every day, and that was something I wasn't used to and it took time to just adjust my daily habits into it. The first two years I just wasn't able to get into the habit of writing a certain word count every day and looking back, a lot of it was because I went into NaNo thinking of it as an assignment.

Well, turns out, when I look at a project as an assignment, I'm in the habit of "putting it off for something more fun". So that was tripping me up as well.

Like I said it was't until the third year that I was able to get into the swing of things and reach 50k (which I ended up doing on day 17 and finished the month at 183k) which is about 6k words a day, quite a bit more then 1,667.

What changed?

Several things.

First off, I spent August, September, and October doing "warm up" sessions. I'd write 200 or so words a day at first. I tried to add more words each day. Soon I was doing 200 words in the morning and 200 words in the evening. By October I was doing 500 words every morning soon as I woke up, 500 more in the afternoon during lunch break and 500 more last thing before bed, ending out most days with 1,500 words. By the time November 1st rolled around, I was doing 700 words 3 times a day (2,100 words a day) so I ended up starting NaNoWriMo doing more then 1,667 a day (which was something I had not intended to do, but after 3 months of increasing my word count every day, I figured why not keep going?) By the end of the first week I was doing 1,667 words a session, 3 times a day (5,000 words a day). A couple of times I reached 7k a day, but most of the month it was 5k a day that was my "comfort zone".

When I hit 50k on day 17 I was "YES! I can stop doing this!", but at 3 and a half months the habit was set in and for some reason I couldn't stop, I felt like I hadn't completed my day if I hadn't written anything. So, I kept of writing to the end of the month, and then December 1st came and again I was "YES! I can stop doing this!", but at 4 months the habit actually was a habit and I kept on writing every day through December, January, February... before I knew it my NaNo #4 was rolling in and I was still writing 5k a day. All but 1 year after that I reached at least 200k (6,667 words a day) (one year was 75k), with my biggest year ending at 537k (17,900 words a day - NEVER trying that again! My hands hurt so much after doing the 500k year and I slept for days on end in December I was so exhausted). This is my 12th NaNo and I'm still writing 5k a day every day for 10 years now. If 20 years ago you had told me I'd be writing 5k a day every single day for 10 years in a row, I'd have told you you was crazy. 

I think the difference for me, why I struggled so much the first 2 years and not after that was simply because I wasn't in the habit of writing every day and it's a difficult habit to get started. But the thing that worked for me was to NOT start out aiming at 1,667 a day. It was just too much. My first 2 years I burned out fast and dropped out the first week, simply because 1,667 words is a huge amount of words for someone who never did it before. I simply could not go from 0 every day to 1,667 every day cold turkey. I had to start out much smaller and work up to it.

For me, starting out with 200 words a day was the thing that made it manageable. And after a week or so, I reaching a point of "Hey, 200 a day is easy, let's try 400 a day" and a couple weeks of that I was "400 a day is easy now, how about trying 600 words a day?"

In the end it took me about 3 months of slowly increasing word count each day/week before I was able to do the 1,667 a day goal.

The other thing that helped me was, doing small chunks throughout the day. 200 words here, 200 words there. 400 words here, 400 words there.

The year I tried to do the millimonth (million words in 30 days) (the year I reached 537k) I found out some important things:

First that writing 33,337 words a day is REALLY hard. I had 2 days the first week I made it to 35k and realized, there was no way in heck I was going to reach a million words in 30 days, because at Day 2 when I crossed 50k, my hands were already screaming "THIS IS TOO MUCH!!! STOP! STOP! STOP!" I wasn't able to reach a 3rd 30k because my hands hurt so much. That got me really thinking about NaNoWriMo and why I was doing it. I mean, what was my goal? I wasn't sure. 

Next, there was the sleep issues - even at my top speeds, in order to reach the 17k a day I was doing that year, I was only getting 2 hours of sleep a day. Which resulted in it wasn't just my hands that were hurting. My whole body started aching. My back, my arms, my legs, everything was screaming "THIS IS TOO MUCH!!! STOP! STOP! STOP!"

The lesson it taught me in the end was this:

KNOW YOUR LIMITS! 

I was working way beyond my limits that year and in the end what I wrote wasn't even publishable. The higher my word counts got the worse my spelling and grammar got, the less sleep I got the less sense anything I wrote made, the more caffeine I drank the more hyper my characters got. It was a mess in the end. And I was left at the end of the month - cranky, tired, hurting, and all I got out of it was a really long gibberish mess I couldn't publish. I went into it thinking I'd have 4 or 5 novels I could edit and publish in the end, but they just were not salvageable. I had crossed to 500k mark in 30 days but I wasn't happy with the end results and I ended up feeling I had just wasted an entire month's worth of writing.





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