Posts about writing. Writing is my work but since I work better when I pretend work isn’t work, I mostly call it fun—even when it isn’t. ;)
Slow start today, but a short nap turned things around. Naps are almost like little miracle cures.
Day 9: I wrote 1,521 words for the NANO book.
That means I am just where I need to be at 15,159 words total for the NANO book.
That also means I need to try to get ahead so I have a cushion in case I don’t write one day for whatever reason. I don’t want to be playing catch up. I want to win. :)
Day 8: I wrote 1,019 words for the NANO book (but 1,835 words for all my fiction).
As with yesterday, this screenshot is a day after screenshot so the average per day is wrong unless I write zero words today. That’s not the plan.
:)
Day 7: I wrote 1,207 words for the NANO book.
My NANO word count is now 12,619 words.
Here’s a screenshot I took a few minutes ago. It shows numbers as of today (day 8) but it also shows that I was still a little ahead as of last night. Since today’s writing is coming up, I’m very comfortable with my progress. :)
If my blog posts get a little more sloppy, it’s because I’m going to be using them to practice writing more intuitively and to stop self-censoring myself so much.
Maybe I’ll get better at getting it right the first time, or maybe I’ll just get to enjoy my blog a little more.
I don’t like taking a lot of time away from my writing to do the posts, and yet sometimes, I really just want to write a post. So I think making them quicker to write and less of a chore is the way to go.
I forgot to post that I’m participating in NANO this year (NaNoWriMo, actually, meaning National Novel Writing Month, forever hereafter to be called NANO by me).
I’m actually doing pretty well. I got off to a strong start on a new(ish) book (nope, I haven’t finished the ending of the last book, still working on it).
Days 1–4: I wrote 11,412 words for the NANO book (12,299 words total for all my fiction).
Yeah, I know. It is crazy how I went from a few words a day to a 3,075 a day average without even trying.
(ETA 11/8/18: I think it’s because I might be a burst writer, even if I’m not a hugely productive burst writer.)
October 21-31 I wrote 616 words net of those I deleted, or 56 words a day average. Mostly because I had 7 days of zero writing, after making a note to myself that said: “Gave up on daily writing. It sucks.” (I wasn’t feeling well. I even went to my GP doctor—for the first time since 2010 apparently so I had to go in as a new patient. And yeah, even I was shocked by the length of time I’d managed to avoid my GP.)
Back to NANO.
I had my first bad day on Monday, day 5, but only because I spent the entire day working on that ending of the book I can’t seem to finish. I wrote 515 words that day while deleting stuff and moving some things around.
Once I realized on Monday night that I just wasn’t feeling up to writing anything for the new book, I decided to make it up on Tuesday, but, ack, tornadoes blew through the area at 2:05 am (ish) and my power went out. It stayed out until 8:20 (ish) Tuesday evening. So there went day 6.
I freely admit I could have written something on day 6 (yesterday) because I had at least an hour of charge in my laptop battery left, but I chose to sit huddled up on the couch for most of the day reading instead. :)
Days 5–6: I wrote 0 words for the NANO book (515 words total for all my fiction).
Par for NANO for days 1–6 is 1,667 x 6 = 10,002 words.
Today is day 7 and I’m just about to sit down to write. I’m still on track for a NANO win. All I have to do is keep writing. :)
I don’t have a plan. I just know I won’t be timing myself. I’ll write until I’m done for the day and that’s that. That’s what I’ve been doing since November 1st and I’m very happy with my progress.
I have adopted a new philosophy over the last week.
I’ve been writing fiction, wanting to write fiction, for most of my life. If I’m having trouble getting myself to write, there’s something wrong. I’ve decided enthusiasm is the problem. I’ve just not been focused on writing what I really want to write. It is essential that I always focus on writing what calls to me. Even if it doesn’t fit my own ideas about what I should want to write. :)
And, in all honestly, it seems to be working.
(Just to clarify, I’m still working on the same books, I’m just making sure I write what I want to write and not what I imagine someone else wants me to write or what I think I should write. Make sense?)
October was a nice month for my writing. It probably could have been better, but I started feeling bad and even reached a point when I wrote a note to myself in my word count spreadsheet that said simply, “Gave up on daily writing. It sucks.”
I did, in fact, give up on my daily writing streak.
But it was still my best month since September 2017.
Words written in October: 20,602.
Despite the end of the daily writing streak and a nice little streak of zero words days that came about when I started feeling bad (not quite sick but definitely under the weather) I feel like my recovery from whatever was interfering with my writing is almost complete.
I was going to respond to a blog post I ran across today but found the commenting system was using Disqus which I don’t use and realized I had too much to say for a comment anyway.
Here’s a link: Writing under the influence: productivity and motivation tips to help authors write faster. It’s an interesting post, but the thing that really stood out to me is that I’ve finally (finally!) come across someone with some of the exact same issues in writing and productivity that I have spent six years talking about on this blog.
A “successful” writing day for me right now – when I’m consistent – is 1500 words a day, with two big problems.:
#1. It takes me about 5 sprints to hit 1500 words, but I spread them out throughout the day. So even though technically they only take me about 2 hours, they actually take up my whole day (and I’m too mentally exhausted to do anything else).
I have done the numbers ten ways to Sunday and if I could consistently write for only 4 hours a day, I could put out a book a month.
I can’t do it.
I have tried and tried and tried and tried. I have been trying for approximately 6 years. 75 months. 2,264 days. What it always comes down to is that 4 hours a day of writing takes me all day and I can do that for a few days or even a week sometimes, but I cannot maintain that pace indefinitely. Even my best month of the entire last 6 years of writing (75 months of word counts!) had me averaging 3.83 hours a day. I reached 57,249 words that month, back in April 2016, and I am still trying to beat that number.
#2. I don’t stay consistent. Weeks or months go by without actively working on my books. But when I open, when I start, I can do 1500 words.
This is my bench lifting ability right now. But if I ONLY do this much, I won’t be building my muscles or increasing in stamina. I’ll be coasting, not improving. I WANT to be writing 5,000 words a day, though I’d be happy with 3000 words. That would give me a longish novel a month, plus editing – and I could finish shorter works of 50K in a month (or less!)
Yeah. I want to write about 2000 words a day. I have a 2000 words a day plan, in fact. I know I should be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time every day. And yet… see my comment above. 2000 words a day takes me about 4 hours (timed writing). 4 hours of timed writing takes me all day. I have occasionally done better, finished early, etc. That’s not something I have ever been able to keep up for longer than a few days.
I’ve tried schedules, and timers, and sprinting, and writing for the love of it. I’ve tried time boxing and time blocking and micro-managing my writing time. I’ve tried eliminating sugar and coffee and tea and I’ve tried more coffee and tea and enough sugar to make me sick. I’ve tried exercise and vitamins and candles and music and clear desks and Leechblock. I’ve tried so, so many things, and all I have to show for it is a string of successful days and failed days and no pattern at all to discern anything of note.
Right now I can do about 1200 words/day consistently. Sometimes 1600. The main problem is it takes me ALL DAY to do this; even though I space out the sprints, I procrastinate and avoid. Then I get behind on other work or projects, and get anxious.
This is a big problem: I can only hit my wordcount goals if I literally do NOTHING else.
And this is due to resistance. But why am I resisting the writing? Because I say stuff like “I’m slow, I’m no good at drafting, writing the first draft is HARD for me.” I don’t believe writing HAS to be a struggle, but it obviously is for me… so I’m avoiding it. How can I write and still have time and energy for everything else on my list?
See the similarities to my own issues mentioned above?
I hope the author of the post figures things out eventually. Maybe it’ll be something I can learn from and apply to my own issues.
And it was nice to feel less alone for a few minutes today.
In the meantime, I’m trying to brainstorm alternative paths to becoming the prolific writer I want to be. All the planning in the world hasn’t seemed to have helped me in the slightest.
Daily average for the first two months (July and August 2012) (no timers, no goals other than to finish a book ASAP): 904 words a day.
All time daily average as of today: 552 words a day.
Daily average this month (timed writing almost every day): 908 words a day.
Yeah. Not much else to say, is there? I sure hope I can figure out some way to put my strengths to work for me in writing and actually improve my yearly/monthly word counts. Because trying to fix my weaknesses hasn’t done much for me at all. I’m still sitting right where I started: inconsistent, slow, and full of resistance.
Trying something new today. I’ll detail it out once the day is done, but I’m hopeful, despite the fact that I got up an hour later than I needed to for my plan! It’s always something, and it will always be something, so why not see if I can still accomplish what I’d like to accomplish even when things go wrong?
I’ll be back when I have progress to report.
Update: 1,743 words and a success with my plan which I’m calling my 5 by 5 plan. See that post for details (which I haven’t written yet but will be writing shortly).
I’ve spent the vast majority of the day avoiding my book, because I have a decision to make about the scene I’m in the middle of writing and I don’t want to make it.
Instead, I’ve spent my time messing around with Thunderbird. I added a new account and then couldn’t sort it into the place I wanted it in the account list because the Manually Sort Folders add-on I rely on for that kind of thing isn’t compatible with the version of Thunderbird I’m using now. I’m stumped on how to do the sorting through the prefs.js file, because I’ve followed every set of directions I can find and nothing seems to work. So of course it turned into just the kind of challenge I often let myself sink into instead of focusing on whatever problem I’m having that I need to resolve—like the unsettled plot direction of my book.
Yay.
I’ve just about used all the time I can on other things, though, because I do need to get back to that story problem. I know I can resolve it, but it will require me to actually work on the book. Thinking about these things never seems to give me the breakthroughs I need. Only writing will do that.
Update: Just before I called it a night, I deleted my entire chapter 22. That was 1,246 words. Good riddance. Now I can move into tomorrow with a fresh start on this chapter and hope the direction is better for my muse!
September was an interesting month. I needed to write a lot of words and I didn’t, really, but I still did reach my goal of September becoming my best month of writing I’d had all year. November 2017 is the last time I had a better word count.
I feel like I’m still recovering, but I’m definitely making progress. I still haven’t finished my first book of the year, but I’m getting close. So close, in fact, that I’m making a push to finish it today. We’ll see how it goes. :)
Written in September: 13,358 words.
It’s October now, and I’m just under two thousand words shy of beating September’s word count. With a little hard work, I’ll surpass that number today.
Oh, and today is the 38th day in my streak of writing every day which started on September 4th. That’s good too.
I actually have multiple things going on here right now, trying to find ways to get myself to write more often, more words, and with more consistency.
Not only am I attempting to write every day, I’m also trying to reach and maintain a 2,000 words a day average.
Today is day 27 of my streak of writing every day (which assumes I will stop writing this and actually go write some fiction in a minute!), so Yay! for that, but the last day I reached 2,000 words in a day was seven days ago, so not so yay for that.
However, I’ve put some things behind me, and I’m hoping today will be better.
My plan is to write for a minimum of six hours today (using a countdown timer set for six hours) and write a minimum of 2,400 words. I’ll need a pace of 400 words an hour to do that IF I run that timer all the way down to zero. I do plan to do that. :D
I tried this the day before yesterday and came up short on time. I also came up short on words. I was distracted and that distraction made me write slowly and I lost a lot of time.
I’m going to try not to let that happen today. Now, I’m off here to go write for six hours.
So. I kind of burned some bridges yesterday. I think that’s a good thing, in this particular case.
I’ve been dealing with some angst about KB for a while as I’m sure some of my previous posts here have made clear, and it had all turned into an emotional sinkhole and I needed to climb out.
I have also decided that this applies to all forums. Forum culture is not for me. Forums promote engagement and investment of self, but it is very much an illusion. I get attached to the people on the other side of the keyboard. They’re real people to me, and these kinds of real relationships and friendships don’t exist for a lot of the people who post on social sites online. They do not care about me, and they will never care about me. So to protect myself, I have had to realize this and decide to step back permanently from these kinds of spaces.
Here’s the thing. I might omit details or gloss over some things to protect my privacy, but I am here and I’m me. I’m not trying to be someone else, despite my pseudo-anonymous posting here. I don’t knock other people down to make myself look more accomplished, successful, or lucky next to them. I mean, my God, have you been reading this blog? :-o
Maybe sometimes I can’t seem to make up my mind about who I am, but that’s because I honestly don’t know sometimes. I think my posts speak clearly on that topic!
Anyway, I said some things that I meant, but I don’t know if I said them well, or that I don’t regret having said some of them. I’m not going back to see if I can figure it out. I burnt that bridge. When I walked away, the thread I was posting in had just been locked, and that’s how I’m leaving it in my head.
I blocked KB using the ad-blocker add-on I use in Firefox (uBlock Origin) and I blocked it on my phone.
It’s done.
I have always found burning bridges to be an effective (if last resort) option to eliminate things from my life. This, I expect, will be no different.
I’ve written some fiction every day now for 20 days.
Next up, get my daily average at or above 2,000 words by writing 2,400 words a day.
Today I’m trying to get to that 2,400 words for the first time in a very, very long time. (I did not get there yesterday.) I’m going to do it by writing in 15 minute sessions, in blocks of 4, using the same set up as mentioned in the “Timed sessions are back” post.
I’ve already completed one session. I’ll update whenever I need a break between sessions. That’ll give me a bit of a distraction but not by doing something that’s likely to derail me from my writing today.
Also, just putting it out there, but I’m thinking if the first hour or two go well, I might turn today into an attempt to best my best day of writing. 5,816 is the number to beat there.
We’ll see how it goes. Right now, I have a mere 99 words after one session. That pace is too slow for this to be a record-breaking day of writing for me.
Update
Words today: 2,445.
I don’t think I went into this in my last post, but I have recently made a small change to my 2,000 words a day plan.
I’m aiming for 2,400 words a day instead.
Not because I want to actually average 2,400 words a day, because that has not changed. A 2,000 words a day average is still my overarching goal. But writing 2,400 a day means I won’t have to think so much about getting ahead or playing catch up if I miss a day here and there. That’s the big reason for this and I think it will work well in the long-term.
Even though I have yet to have one 2,400 word day since I started my plan.
I haven’t had a 2,000 word day either since my last on 8/20, so yeah. :D
But I have a plan!
It almost worked yesterday, too, but in the end, I let too much come between me and the writing.
Plus, the writing is actually not going great because I had to go back to chapter nine and do something I hate doing (restart a scene that’s already part of the book), because I wrote the chapter in the wrong view point. I recognized it when I just kept going back to the start of that chapter trying to figure out why I had no interest in that scene and why I couldn’t seem to move forward and why it felt so flat. I tried a couple of different openings for the scene, and in one, it just came out in another character’s view point, and I just knew then that I had solved the problem. :D
Sometimes these things are just hard to see because we’re so tied to what’s already there.
Today, I hope my plan will get me to the 2,400 words I want.
15 minute sessions, in blocks of 4. Same set up as I mentioned in the timed sessions are back post.
It worked well yesterday to keep me writing and focused, and I’m excited to use it again today.
2,400 words at a 400 WPH (words per hour) pace is 6 hours of timed writing. That’s a lot, but that’s at the slow end of the scale.
At a more peppy 600 WPH pace, these 2,400 words will take me 4 hours of timed writing. Doable, and not an insane work load, by far, even knowing I take 1.5 to 2 hours just to get 1 hour of writing done.
If things are going really well, and it does happen, at a speedy 800 WPH pace, 2,400 words take only 3 hours. I will be pushing for this as often as I can, to give me more time for reading/studying/learning/cover design practice and publishing stuff. :D
We’ll see how this plays out during my writing sessions today, but I am hopeful.
I really need a breakthrough with this thing, because I’m serious about making this 2,400 words a day work. I have so many books to write and I want them all written yesterday! This is the next best realistic option for me.
My love/hate relationship with KBoards is pretty much over. VerticalScope bought the site from the former owner and snuck in terms of use changes that I noticed and brought to the attention of the other members, and boom, explosions happened.
When all was said and done (not all has been said and done, but it’s getting there), many of the members agreed that the terms were onerous, ugly, possibly illegal (laying claim to rights VS can’t have just because you’ve posted something on the board, and then stating there’s no recourse if they misappropriate or infringe them, and other weird, overreaching, and unconscionable shit like that), and made it not worth the risk to stick around and keep posting.
I agreed, but since I’ve been mostly anonymous as a user on KB for all the years I’ve been posting there, I wasn’t worried for me. I wasn’t even worried about what VerticalScope might do with the content I still had up because most of it is very much just random comments. There’s not much there to be honest, because I delete most of my posts every year or two to keep things fresh. But then the community manager for VerticalScope, Helene, came on and acted like an asshole with no respect at all for the valid concerns of the non-anonymous members.
So I decided nope not sticking around with assholes like that in charge. Then I went in and cleaned out the 700-ish posts I did still have there.
Permission denied, VerticalScope, I do not choose to agree to your Terms of Use.
I left a few posts, ones that were relevant to the topic of the terms of use, and some in a thread I’d started recently, and that’s it. I decided not to abandon the thread I started but I won’t be posting much in it and will let it die if no one else posts. At that point, I will clear out those posts too, because I don’t like leaving loose threads behind.
Whether or not I post anything else there in the future depends entirely on what VerticalScope does or does not change. As of right now, the plan is to truly abandon KB and not go back once my own thread has died out.
In the meantime, I’ve found a different forum to use to keep up with the news I usually get from KB.
I am sad about this, despite the fact that I’ve been pretty hard on Kboards here. I really had hoped when I posted about the new Terms of Use that someone would come onto the thread and make a good case for why the changes weren’t anything to worry over. I’m disappointed it turned out to be just as ugly as my gut was telling me.
But now that this has all happened, what I really want is to take this opportunity to cut back how much reading/participating/posting I do on any publishing forum. Until I get to the point where I can reliably write my words every day and have plenty of time left over, all this other stuff is just getting in my way. :D
On that note, Leechblock is back.
For those not in the know, that’s 10 minutes total for all those sites combined, in a four hour period. You would be astounded (or maybe not) how quickly 10 minutes goes when you’re trying to read a busy thread. Yesterday I started out with a 4 minute limit and boy was that frustrating in the extreme! :D I had to ease up so that I didn’t become so frustrated that I abandoned this effort. I quite like it.
In the past, I usually turned off access to certain sites during certain times, which works not at all when you’re not tied to a writing schedule. :) I also had tried limiting myself to so much total time per day on some sites, but my personality is such that I would use all the time, then get annoyed that I couldn’t go back for the entire day. So that didn’t work, because I constantly cheated myself by pausing or resetting Leechblock.
This particular set up seems to work well with my brain. I get to look at the clock and know it’s only a few hours until I can go back if I get locked out, and that is soon enough to trick me into getting on with other things instead of dwelling on it and then ultimately cheating. :D
The news tab is even more restricted. I allow 2 minutes every 4 hours, with the intent to save anything I really want to read to Pocket. :) I do my Pocket reading when I’m really desperate for something to occupy my mind. Half the time, I delete a whole bunch of stuff unread because I’ve let it get stale and lost interest. That right there, my friends, is half the battle won. :D
Well, I’ve wasted enough of my morning writing this up, so I’m moving on to the next post about my upcoming writing sessions. See you there. :)
This post is the result of several drafts. I started it off intending to talk about my attempt to try scheduled writing again. That didn’t work out so the post fell by the wayside.
Me and writing schedules do not fit together, and I can’t believe I’m having to say this again, because I know this.
I’ve been trying to be diligent about not giving in to the urge to use timers for writing, but last night, I realized just how counterproductive that resistance has been.
I didn’t want to give in, but nothing has really been working for me lately. (Well, except for OneNote. My canceled subscription ended without a hitch and I never noticed a thing.) I need to write. I have a book to finish and I am ready (really ready) to become a prolific writer. I’ve challenged myself to improve how much and how often I write so that I can end this year in a much better place than it started. If that doesn’t happen, I at least want to get back to where I was just two years ago (production-wise) and that has felt impossible these last several months.
It’s taking me a very long time to get back into the groove of writing. I feel like I don’t even remember how to do it some days. Everything is choppy and annoying and nothing is coming easy, and frankly, I’m boring myself with some of the stuff I’m writing. Which means I’m probably going to bore other people too.
I suffer from the delusion that you can stop doing something for six months and come back to it as good as you were before. :o
Nope! It takes time to get back into a groove and get comfortable again–to get into habits and routines that make things easier. No one would expect a pro-ball player to take six months off (seriously off, not secretly puttering at it) and then be right back in the zone the very month they came back. It would take time. Practice, exercise, effort. I tend to ignore all that and just think I should be able to fall right back into things after some of my extended breaks and not miss a beat. Oops. Most of us know that’s not how it goes!
So last night I used a few 12 minute sessions to get back into the groove of things and it felt great. I had really missed my timers. Sure, it’s nice to write sometimes and look up and realize I’ve written a lot of words in what feels like no time at all. But it is also nice to write and know that I need to keep going just a little longer before I quit because I might actually get somewhere if I do.
I’ve gone right back to the 48 minute sessions I had decided were the perfect length the day before I decided to abandon timers. (I must not have written about this here because I could find a diary entry about it but not a blog post.) I had figured out that 48 minutes was the best length for so many good reasons, but when I sat down to do them, I could only do one and kept putting the next sessions off, and all that angst led me to decide I was done with the timers. So… good and bad, those 48 minute sessions. :D
I set up a simple table in my spreadsheet to track my current session, and I decided that sometimes, I might want to focus on smaller bits—
Like this:
| Words | WPH | |
| 12 | 0 | |
| 12 | 0 | |
| 12 | 0 | |
| 12 | 0 | |
| 0 | 0 |
—or longer bits—
Like this:
| Words | WPH | |
| 48 | 0 | |
| 48 | 0 | |
| 48 | 0 | |
| 48 | 0 | |
| 0 | 0 |
—but which I choose is really just going to depend on what kind of day I’m having.
:)
In the end, it’s pretty clear that I’ve come full circle. It’s 2018 and without even realizing it, I have come back to the very place I talk about in that post.
That post, which I came across today for the first time in ages, could have been written yesterday, it is so close to my current thoughts and goals.
A week ago, I made some calculations (without any memory of that post and what it contained) and came up with 2,192 words as my daily goal. I didn’t post here about that change to my 2,000 WPD plan, because 2,000 was a nice round number and I didn’t think it mattered. Then last night, I decided 2,400 was better, because it fit neatly into the timed writing goals I was working out and would mean I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping my 2,000 words a day average if I missed a day or two of writing every so often.
Really, truly, it’s uncanny how apt that post is for what I’m dealing with right now.
So that’s where I am. :)
Now that’s enough of that. I have writing to do.
I realized I never did my August summary post so here it is.
Things are still better than they were, even if my August word count is lower than my June word count (11,281). It did come in better than my July word count (6,478), so I’m pleased about that.
Words written in August: 7,840.
I’d like to make September my best yet of the year, but we’ll have to see how things go.
I wrote 723 words yesterday.
I haven’t given up on my 2,000 words a day plan, but progress doesn’t always happen in leaps and bounds, obviously. :)
I don’t know that I even care how many days I’ve been working on my current book. I know I wrote previously that it could be nice information to have and might help me stay on track, but now I’m not so sure at all. Seeing 104 or 110 doesn’t feel like much of anything: I have trouble seeing at a glance just what it means. 104 and 110 and even 200 feel like small numbers to me, so things feel like they’re going well. Yet tell me it’s been more than three months and wow, that feels like a very long time.
What I’ve concluded is that this measure is just not going to be useful to me and I’ve decided to abandon the effort.
So that didn’t last long, but hey, we have to try new things sometimes and then recognize when they’re not going to work. This one sounded book on paper but didn’t translate well to real life.
Right now, I want to keep my eye on the prize and push for that 2,000 words a day goal without all these other distractions.
For years I’ve avoided thinking of writing as work. I’ve even written a blog post about how writing is not a job, and after re-reading that, I stand behind what I said about it not being a job. However, I’ve also started to have a realization that for me, maybe doing everything I can to avoid thinking of my writing as work isn’t the right path for me.
I was raised to believe that my work had value. That no matter what job I had, the work I did was valuable. I hate jobs, no two ways around that, but I don’t hate work. I’ve never hated work, really. I can name only a few very specific instances where I might have hated it, if it’d gone on too long, and they all involved boring-as-hell work. Even then, I considered what I did valuable. Just boring.
But my hobbies, reading and writing? Not valuable at all. Time wasters. Time passers. Whatever you want to call it.
It occurred to me that by doing everything I can not to think of my writing as work, I’ve essentially told myself that it has little or no value, despite the fact that I’m living off the money it brings in.
Last night I decided it was time for an attitude adjustment. I can continue to hate jobs and I can continue to avoid having a job—even a self-imposed one—for the rest of my life. But what I can’t do is continue to not think of my writing as my work.
Work can be fun and awesome. I know this. Just because other people sometimes have issues when they think of writing as work doesn’t mean I do or have to. In fact, I’d say I don’t, because for me, work is about doing the best you can. You’re invested. It’s a commitment. It’s not “punch the clock, do as crap a job as you can get away with before punching the clock again” kind of thing. That isn’t my world view, and it never has been.
It’s perfectly okay to call my writing work.
If I want to change my ways when it comes to getting the writing done every day, every week, every year, then I have to think of my writing as valuable, as important, as something I need to do above all other things. Work has pretty much always fallen inside those lines for me. Work is valuable. Work needs to get done.
It’s time to start ascribing some real value to the writing I do.
Writing is my work. My work is my writing.
There. That wasn’t so hard an adjustment to make.
So that book 19, day whatever lasted a few days. I don’t even know what to say about this. The day after my last post, I pretty much decided I was spending too much time detailing out my struggle to write and that I should focus more on actually writing, you know? So I made a pact with myself to stop writing about the struggle. There is no struggle. My issues with work are not related to writing, except that writing is my work. But I don’t have a problem writing once I start. It’s really just this other thing—these other issues—and I’m tired of putting all that on my writing.
That means my posts about writing either need to be about the story, the process, or my actual word counts. Instead of wasting so much valuable time and energy day after day just writing about how hard it is to make myself write.
So that’s it. This post is a way station and I haven’t figured out exactly where I’m going from here. Most likely I’ll just start posting about exactly those things I mentioned above: process, story, and word count updates.
Since I haven’t written much over the last several days, I haven’t had anything to post about.
I can still use my book xx, day xxx title format for word count updates, but not if I have to start counting days every time I want to post. Yikes. I didn’t think it would be so tedious to keep up with it.
Currently, I’m annoyed with my story because I feel kind of stuck at the moment, and my word counts have suffered greatly because of some personal stuff I’ve had to deal with over the last several days. I don’t begrudge those days, but man, I’m really behind where I want to be on this story.
On that note, I’m going away to write for a while. Maybe I’ll actually have something to post later that isn’t a post saying what I won’t be posting about anymore. ;)
It was late last night when I wrote all those posts about the writing of my current book, what to call a book, and the day’s progress, and I made some errors. :D
The big one, of course, is that this is not book 21 I’m working on!
This is book 19.
I’ve gone back and edited those posts to take out the wrong information. It just seemed easier that way than trying to note the corrections. :D
I messed up because I used the table I have in my spreadsheet to tell me how many books I have in each category of length: novel, novella, novelette, and short story. That table gave me 18+2=20 for the novel and novella length books.
Or so I thought.
This morning, I remembered something important about that table. It’s pulling data from my “Publish List” which includes every title I’ve published. The table is counting anything over 40,000 words as a novel and is counting a novel that I wrote well before 2012 and that’s no longer published.
I don’t want those two books to count.
The one, I didn’t write but compiled it from stories I’d already written; and the other, well, let me just say it’s old, I’m not sure it’s any good, and I was happy to unpublish it even though it did sell a copy and was one of the things that made me sure I could do this publishing thing for money. :D
Me and late nights do not agree.
So here is the correction:
I have 18 books and 12 short stories. (Between three pen names.)
The book I’m working on now is book 19.