Author: Lynn

I’m trying not to be disappointed! I wrote 1,605 words yesterday. At the halfway point, after I’d completed my morning session, it looked like I’d reach 2,000 for the day, even though I had to work for that morning word count a little too hard. By the time I finished up the evening session, however, my pace had slowed considerably and I just couldn’t make it. I’m trying to loosen up this morning, think positively and all that, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m feeling a bit … stuck, for lack of a better word, and the writing involved an awful lot of deleting yesterday! I’m hoping there won’t be an encore.

I wrote 2,018 words today and finished on time. Well, the return to my new routine worked. I like it better anyway. :D

I wrote more than 464 words yesterday, but alas, this morning I deleted some stuff I’d been hanging onto at the end of the doc because I’m not going to be using it. Since I didn’t want to start from a negative position this morning, I knocked those words off yesterday’s count.

I mean, I haven’t started writing yet, so why not? :D

Who cares anyway, right? I had a positive yesterday, and I’m about to start writing the moment I close this window in about 10 seconds. ;)

Time to get started. Today’s goal? A whole lot of words!

Update: So far I haven’t gotten a “whole lot of words” but I’d still like to end up over 1,000 for the day. I’ve done 385 so far, and it took longer than I wanted just to get those. :o

I wrote −52 words yesterday, or better said, I wrote some words and deleted some words and my net loss was 52 words.

I hate it when my word count starts going backward.

I could have done so much better. In defense of my lack of writing, I will say I was distracted for a good part of the day because right before I was supposed to start my first session, I smelled gasoline in the house. I traced it to a leaking gas tank in my lawn mower in the basement, and the only thing I can think happened is that the cold weather did something to it, even though it was in the basement and the basement never got that cold. I mean, my pipes didn’t freeze. But still, I spent a lot of time worrying about that and trying to air out the basement and the rest of the house, and ended up with a headache to boot.

Still, I should have gotten some writing done. I had time. I just chose not to write. :(

Today, I need to make up some lost ground. I have a schedule for completing this book and I don’t want to push past the deadline I’ve set myself unless I have to. Situations like yesterday aren’t troublesome enough to be a legitimate reason for pushing my deadline.

I’m working on treating my deadlines with more respect.

I wrote 599 words today. I wish it had been more. I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t manage to stick with it today but I’m going to blame it on a lack of sleep the night before.

Tomorrow is another day as they say.

** Well, I’m still at 552, so I’m going to save this for tomorrow and try again. Right now I’m just hoping to work up the energy to finish the night above 1,000. :D **

Basically, I want a repeat of yesterday. I started not to create this post, but with that sense of urgency gone (I get anxious to post an update but know I can’t until I finish something update-worthy) I found myself staring at my spreadsheet and feeling no push to get started at all.

So, here I am. I have a lot of books I want to write this year and they won’t write themselves.

Goal 1— 625 (at 552)
Goal 2— 1250
Goal 3— 1875
Goal 4— 2500
Goal 5— 3125

I’m writing in 1h 15m sessions where the goal is 500 wph. Honestly, I’m enjoying this session length so much I’d like this to be my regular routine. When I’m not on a deadline, this will fit right in with my morning and evening writing routine I love so much. 2 sessions first thing and 2 sessions last thing. It adds up to just 40 more minutes of writing a day than my original goal and I can use those to catch up on my goal for a 2k daily average for the year. And when I don’t get to the evening session, I’ll still have written over a thousand words and that’s nothing to snort about. Now, for fresh tea and getting started…

Progress—

I’ll be back in about an hour and a half to update my progress.

Goal 1: First session went too slow and I only made it to 552 words. My pace was way off yesterday’s for my first session. By this time yesterday, I was also already well into my second session. My late start might be the problem or it might just be the fact that I came up a couple of hours short of sleep last night. I tried to get an extra hour or so of sleep this morning the same as I did yesterday, but I couldn’t. I do think it’s affecting my thinking and my stamina. I’m really not liking this time change after all. It didn’t seem to affect me the first day but now I’m really feeling it. I’m getting tired of yawning. It might be time for a quick refresher nap if I can manage it. It’ll put be further behind but it might speed up my writing enough to make up for that. Worth a shot anyway. ;)

I wrote 3,183 words today, exceeding my goal for the day. You can read that other post for notes on how the day went. :D

I hesitated to even write this post! I wrote 155 words yesterday. It was more time spent revisiting old material and I never even got my timers started because I’m making it a point not to run my timer when I’m working over material that’s already written.

I don’t want to be revisiting this stuff, but the book is not going well and I knew I needed to get some stuff figured out before I moved on. That’s what I mean by revisiting old material. I’m not really rewriting, per se, I’m just trying to reconfigure what’s happening and in the process things do get changed. Put another way, I don’t rewrite sentences to make them sound better (most of the time—I’m not going to say I never); I rewrite sentences to fit the story I’m trying to tell.

The real truth in all this is that I’m just not spending enough time writing. I tend to shut down and bail as soon as it gets hard. I need to overcome this habit if I want to be prolific (and I do—obviously just not as badly as I want writing to be easy for me).

I’m late starting today (it’s 9:54 am) but I aim to do a better job of staying with the writing today even when it gets hard.

And I’m feeling a bit let down by myself. I really thought I had a shot at reaching the 2,167 words yesterday when I wrote the post the day before. Then I forgot all about it and yesterday morning I updated my reports and adjusted my figure based on more accurate numbers. Still, if I’d met my goal, I would have done better than the 2,167 by a few hundred words so now I’m even more bummed.

I’m starting to hate this book. This isn’t a usual feeling for me so I’m feeling out of sorts. I can’t stop feeling like it’s horrible, like I’ve written several of my characters one way and then another, and that not only are they are inconsistent, but they’re just repeats of characters I’ve done before. I don’t usually feel that way either!

Something’s going to have to break loose today or I’m going to have to delete … about 9,000 words. Ugh! What a mess. Talk about being behind schedule. If I delete that much, I might as well kiss the idea of finishing this book this month goodbye, because it won’t happen.

I’m also a bit disturbed by the amount of deleting I’ve been doing over the past 6 months. I’m starting to wonder if it’s getting out of control—meaning I’m letting perfectionism ruin perfectly good writing. I’m going to have to think about that before I hit the delete key this time.

Perfectionism is a dream destroyer. I can’t let it into my writing. :o

Okay, I’m guessing again because I can’t remember and I’m not on my computer at the moment and won’t be again tonight. I think I wrote 906 words today. I’ll correct it tomorrow if I’m wrong. :)

Corrected. :)

I wrote only 205 words today, despite stopping only 25 minutes short on my morning session. Too much reworking old material instead of writing new, something I detailed in my post with yesterday’s word count.

Tomorrow, I stop letting myself stop my sessions short like this. I really should have finished it, and instead I watched too much tv, thinking I could think my way out of this if I just let my mind relax.

Yeah. That’s exactly how that works.*

Tomorrow. Seriously. I’m going to break the 2,167 word wall that seems to have sprung up in front of me sometime over the last two months. I haven’t had a 2,000 word day since January 3. It’s time to correct that.

Also, I want to watch more of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and Archer season 5 on Netflix, and I want to do it without feeling guilty. So, 2,167 tomorrow. Barring a dire emergency, count on it. :D

*Sarcasm.

I wrote only 449 words yesterday. I came up an hour and twenty-one minutes short on my morning session, but I intended to get back to it after … well, let’s cut this story short and get to the point. I didn’t finish that one and never started the evening session.

I’m going to get better, I swear, but today wasn’t the day either. Sadly enough, those 449 words are more than I’ve managed today in twice the time. I only have 23 minutes left on my timer for this morning (it’s definitely not morning now) and I have only 205 words. I’m not even sure I’ll get more. I’d like to blame the time change, but the time change isn’t the problem. I’ve hardly noticed it this year.

I know what the problem is, or at least what’s messed up my writing for the last three days. I have no idea what’s going on in my story. I have a scene that I stopped in the middle of and I have a character in the middle of something but I don’t have any idea what the next move is. The next sentence isn’t coming to me so I spent the majority of the last two days (today particularly) revisiting previous scenes and going over old material, tweaking here and there.

That’s a waste of time, mostly, and I know it, but it’s about the only thing I feel capable of doing.

The day before yesterday I ended up over 1,000 words only because I skipped around and wrote a couple of bits out of order and that’s never a good thing for me, trust me. I’ll probably end up losing it all later anyway and if I don’t, it’ll hamstring me when I get to the point where I want to work it in and my pace will turn glacial as I try to make it work.

I need to write right past this blank spot. It’s the only real way to get my momentum back. I’ll agonize and mess with old stuff and act like writing is terribly difficult for a while and in the end, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

I think I’m just going to skip all that and go straight to writing my way out of this.

Tomorrow.

As for tonight, I might just go to bed. ;) Daylight Saving Time means 6 am tomorrow is going to feel awfully early.

I’m on pace for 1,090 wph right now. Sounds great, huh? It isn’t that great. That’s for 18 minutes of writing out of 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Because…

I’m not supposed to have WIFI access right now. I’m supposed to have it turned off while I’m doing my morning writing. I didn’t turn it off when I should have and now… well, now I’m updating posts, posting to my author site, and just generally using it to distract myself.

Since I’m trying to get my challenge off the ground today, I need to fully finish this morning’s writing session before I have to stop for some non-writing stuff that I can’t get out of doing today. If I’m behind after that’s done, I won’t catch up. There just won’t be enough time in the day without sacrificing sleep time and I can’t do that without risking tomorrow’s writing.

So, I’m going to have to take corrective action on these developing bad habits. WIFI must stay off during writing time.

And that’s my cue to post this and shut off my WIFI access until I get this morning’s writing finished. I have an hour and 52 minutes to go—unless I can hang onto that 1,090 wph pace. ;) That’d be a really nice start to today.

 

I wrote 1,023 words yesterday (I think). This is another case of not remembering exactly but I’ll check later and correct this if I need to. I do know it was over 1,000 words. :) (I was wrong about it being 1,012 words, but I’ve corrected it now.)

I’m about to get settled in to try starting that challenge again today. I’m wishing myself good (and speedy) writing today! You can wish me luck too if you want! ;)

I wrote 158 words yesterday. I’d say I was embarrassed, after writing that post about how I was going to get to work and finish the time I still had on my timer and get started on my next session, but honestly, I’m really not. :D It is what it is. I couldn’t stand looking at the work and I bailed for the night and watched tv instead.

Today I tried to get a challenge for myself off the ground, but so far it looks like I’ve failed. I wrote for most of my morning session but I’d started late (school’s been out again for bad weather yesterday and today) and then the writing dragged, so I paused with 35 minutes left on the timer. I plan to finish it here shortly but the original plan had been to do the morning session, a mid-morning session of the same length of time, and then my evening session.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the mid-morning session started and it’s looking like I won’t have time tonight to get that session in even if I wanted to.

I might just shelve this one until tomorrow, hit my minimum tonight, read a book, and go to bed happy. :)

I got in another few words last night but I never did settle in for that evening writing session. All in all, I wrote 1,606 words yesterday.

I’m trying again today to finish 2 sessions, but I’ve already put myself at a disadvantage. I started my morning session, wasn’t making good progress (158 words after 50 minutes!), so I paused it and decided to revisit later. Well, later is now and it’s 6:19 pm. :o

Still, the plan is to finish that session and then move right into the evening one. It’s just been that kind of day. We’ll see if it improves any.