Thursday update #1: at 641 words

I’m now at 641 words for the day. I’m still trying to write through the mess that is chapter 12 in this book. :o

I have about 4 hours to write 4.5–5 hours worth of speedy words and I’m not doing speedy today apparently.

But I’m getting back to it now and hopefully I’ll get through this sooner rather than later.

Excited to be writing again, slow progress, and timer woes

I’ve been writing, but I keep forgetting to start the timer, so I have no idea how long I’ve been at it. It’s been excruciatingly slow going though.

I’m at 522 words for the day.

I input all the fixes I’ve had sitting around on my Kindles. I send my docs to Kindle (Kindle Fires to be specific) so I can read them on there (easier reading than on the computer) and I highlight problems to fix later. I had multiple versions of multiple docs on multiple Kindles waiting on me to get around to it. So that’s done. Docs are deleted and I actually discovered a bit of excitement for every one of my books in progress as I read through them looking for the highlights.

Then I turned to my main book, the one I’m trying so hard to finish, and I’ve been working on that problem scene again. It’s a mess. Just no other way to put it. I have no idea what was going on when I wrote it, but I do remember not liking it much at the time. It was the scene stopping me from getting back to writing back in December. I got past it in February (?) finally, but obviously I shouldn’t have ignored my issues with it. I’m paying for that now.

But now I’m going to quit forgetting to start my timer so I can at least track my speed for the rest of those 3,933 words I expect from myself today.

And all in all, I’m quite happy. I’m back at work on my books and I’m not feeling a lot of angst about it. (Yes, books. If I get stuck on this one, I’m moving to another. I’ve even opened all those files so it won’t take any effort at all. It’s really time I quit holding myself back because I’m afraid it’ll take too long to finish anything if I let myself switch projects like that. I have a much better chance of meeting my challenges if I don’t let myself stand still, so to speak.)

Next up: get to 3,933 words today in as little time as possible today.

Even without the timer to back me up, I’d say I’ve been writing for at least 2–3 hours already. That’s not great considering my word count, but when I get moving on this story again, I know I can do better.

Accountability check-in: 12-month 1,180,000 words challenge

Time for some accountability for my 12-month 1,180,000 words challenge.

So far, I’ve made a ridiculously small amount of progress towards that big challenge.

My 2016 word count to date is 34,615.

That’s, uh, not good. If 2016 was the beginning of that challenge (and originally it was) I should be sitting at 290,958 words.

So, uh, yeah.

But that’s okay, because I can fail but that doesn’t mean I have to give up, and I’m not giving up. I’m restarting this challenge as of today, and I’m not going to let myself down this time. I’m feeling optimistic today, after a day when I was definitely not feeling optimistic yesterday.

I can do this.

And I don’t need a schedule to do it. I just need to focus on writing what I want (that’s where I find joy and motivation in writing) and I need to remember I do have something to prove, but only to myself.

I can do this.

Yesterday was a day of more time, less words; let’s avoid a repeat

More time, less words is exactly opposite of my plan, but yesterday, that’s exactly what happened. I made very little progress on my word count for this book, but I did make progress. I don’t like rewriting stuff, but that’s what happened with the scene where I’d like to just ax everything and start fresh (but that’d mean losing 35,000 words and some of them I don’t actually want to lose).

I didn’t ax it, and I tried to avoid rewriting sentences in the vein of just trying to make things sound better, because that wasn’t the kind of rewriting it needed at all. It was about the scene itself. It’s just never really worked for me, and I gave some people some additional dialogue, tried to clear up some actions and movements, and stuff like that.

I’m actually still going to be working on this same scene this morning, at least for a bit, because I still need to finish that part up. I’ll be expanding a bit on an element I ignored so that I can tie things up at the end of the book. Honest to God, I don’t actually know what this is yet, and that’s why this is dragging so bad, but I’m going to come up with something if I have to gut this damn scene. (I’m actually very close to the end of this book, I think, but this scene takes place 35,000 words before where I’m at with the writing. If I don’t want to have to drag out the ending to clear all this stuff up, I need to set something up here so I can more easily deal with it there.)

Maybe I should just say I tried to fix the scene to do more of the things I want it to do—even if I don’t know what those things are yet, because I definitely didn’t go at it worried that the writing was bad, except in the sense that the actual scene didn’t read right to me. It doesn’t carry its weight and doesn’t do much but take up space, and yet it can’t be excised because it does have a purpose.

Gah. It’s all so hard to explain. Anyway, time to get to it. I have some enthusiasm going for the writing this morning and I plan to take advantage of it. I have one quick post to write about accountability and then it’s on to the writing. See you later for an update. :D