Category: Writing

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. ;)

Word count post for Nov. 25-28, 2016

Lynn

Nov. 25: 0
Nov. 26: 0
Nov. 27: 970
Nov. 28: 1,867

I’ve been sick. I started feeling sick on the 22nd, but the morning of the 26th was definitely my worst day. I had planned to write on the 25th but I just couldn’t make myself do it. Then I started to feel better by the night of the 26th and here I am, just about completely over it. I have a bit of heaviness in my chest that still bothers me, but the sinuses have cleared up remarkably fast.

Daily average since 9/19: 992 words.

I really didn’t want to fall below 1,000 words again, but I just wasn’t up for another 1,000 words tonight. 2,000 words tomorrow will get me there again and then I can work on making it stick.

Nov. 25 and I have a cold

Lynn

My cold symptoms started the 22nd, but today is the worst day so far. Sneezing, coughing and general malaise. I’ve had worse colds. Still not enjoying this one.

I’ll get too far behind my word counts if I allow another low word count day so I’m going to write today despite the cold.

The plan is for four 1.5 hour blocks where I aim for 1,000 words each. I’m going to try to surprise myself.

No particular schedule, just aiming to get those sessions done and reach my word goal for each of them.

Word count post for Nov. 22, 2016

Lynn

315 words.

I was sick. Although I didn’t really start to feel sick until last night so that excuse doesn’t really fly. Except maybe my body knew I was getting sick and was too busy trying to fight it off to save any energy for writing.

Hey, it’s a better excuse than the truth. I just didn’t ever feel like writing yesterday, and then I got sick.

On the other hand, I’m more sick today than yesterday and I’ve already beat yesterday’s word count by double.

Daily average since 9/19: 1,022 words.

Nov. 19 and it’s COLD outside today!

Lynn

Well, we finally got a bit of rain early this morning (like 3 a.m. early) and the wind gusted and my power went out at about 4. I know because I have a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) for my desktop computer, router, and DSL modem, and it has an annoying beep that never fails to wake me up and keep me awake until either it runs out of backup power, the power comes back on, or I shut it off.

I didn’t feel like getting up this morning, so it kept me from drifting back to sleep for about an hour, and then of course, five minutes after it goes off, the light I turned on when I thought about going to shut it down comes on and startles the crap out of me before it goes right back out. I thought I turned it out, but apparently not. I clicked it off one more time so it wouldn’t come on again if the power returned and went back to sleep.

Yesterday had a high in the low 70s (Fahrenheit). Today the high is supposed to be 46.

And boy can I tell. It is cold.

Now I need to write for 8 hours today, because I’ve been behind my goal word count every day since I started my plan to finish this book.

At this point, here’s what I need to finish by 11/29/2016, which is the (modified) date I’d like to finish: 3,859 words a day (average).

Here’s what I need to do today:

3,859 words to go

6.00 hours planned
– hours completed
643 wph needed

And here’s what I want to do:

6,164 words to go

8.00 hours planned
– hours completed
770 wph needed

I’ll settle for the one and be ecstatic with the other.

Word count post for Nov. 16, 2016

Lynn

1,054 words.

Daily average since 9/19: 969 words.

Remember this scale?

1,000 = low word count day
2,000 = average word count day
3,000 = moderate word count day
4,000 = high word count day
5,000 = record breaking word count day (always, because 5k is huge!)

I’m still trying to get into a routine with writing where I’m reaching the average and moderate word count levels more often than I have low word count days.

Clearly, I’m not there yet.

Second day of new plan and I’m failing to keep up

Lynn

As I said in the post where I discussed my new plan:

At this point, here’s what I need to finish by 11/30/2016, which is the date I’d like to finish: 3,150 words a day (average).

Yesterday, I didn’t keep up, writing only 1,846 words, so my goal number of words each day has now gone up to 3,237 (unless I can make up the entire 1,304 words I’m behind today).

The schedule I’m attempting to follow is:

8–9:30
10–11:30
12:30–2
2:30–4

Which is four 1.5 hour sessions. The goal is 1,000 words per session, or a very reasonable pace of 667 words per hour.

Yesterday, I got behind early and never caught up. In fact, I kept getting further and further behind, until I finished the second session at almost 8:30 last night.

Today isn’t looking much better.

It’s 1:42 pm and I’ve finished one session, which I finished at 11:55 am. I wrote 353 words in that 1.5 hours, which is a TERRIBLE pace. I don’t even know how I managed to do that badly.

Then I took a short 30 minute break (yeah, I know it’s almost two hours later!) and here’s where I am.

I’m about to start session 2, and I’m hoping I can pull myself out of this spiral of doom I seem to have fallen into.

Distractions? None. Or if they exist, they’re all in my head. I honestly, 100%, do not know where my time went this morning. All I can assume is that I started late (and didn’t really notice*), then had to take lots of breaks. I did notice that. Lots of bladder pangs this morning for some reason. TMI, I know. Don’t care. If you do, bail now. This is not the blog for you.

Anyway, I’m putting on headphones, cranking up some music, and going to get down to business with this writing thing. I cannot let today become another failure.

*Possible because I took a nap on the couch less than 10 minutes after I got up this morning. I can’t remember if I even noticed how long I was out.

Further update

I am absolutely and completely off the schedule at this point and it’s 11:14 PM and I’m still trying to write.

Here’s a cut and paste from my tracking spreadsheet.

Session Time in Hours Session Words WPH
1.5 353 235
1.5 409 273
0.75 307 409

Ugly, huh?

And here are the stats:

          285 avg wph
       2,168 words to go
7.6036015 hours to go
         6.00 hours planned
         3.75 hours completed
          963 wph needed

At my current pace, it would take me another 7.6 hours to finish today’s word count. Uh huh.

I could get it done in 2 hours and 15 minutes if I could maintain a 963 wph pace.

But did I mention it was 11:20 PM? (It takes time to write these posts.) I’m tired, so none of that will be happening. On the other hand, I did accomplish something this afternoon and evening.

  1. I discovered that although the pace of this book felt ridiculously slow, it was just feeling that way because of how long it was taking me to write stuff into a scene I already had mostly written. (Those 1000-ish words I wrote today.) When I read back through to see if the story’s pace was as bad as I thought, I discovered that it moved along just fine. So—lesson learned. Pacing is not something I can feel as I write. Don’t delete a bunch of stuff because it’s giving me trouble. Read back through the last few chapters first. (That definitely stole some writing time.)
  2. I had to update my timeline for this series and that meant skim reading a lot of pages from the last book looking for clues about dates and the passage of time. Unfortunately for me, some of these danged books overlap, i.e. the stories happen concurrently*, and I had to create a spreadsheet several books back to keep it straight. I’m trying to write my way out of this situation with this book. Future books will not happen concurrently if I can help it!  (That also definitely stole a lot of writing time.)

*Never set up a series that contains stories that happen concurrently unless you’re a glutton for punishment. It’s a nightmare to keep straight!

Now, I’m off to see if I can get more writing done before I crash. The next update will be nothing more than my word count post for the day.

Consider this a cliffhanger. ;)

 

Word count post for Nov. 15, 2016

Lynn

1,846 words.

I have no excuse that makes sense for why I wasn’t able to get two of my four sessions done yesterday. Also, the two I did finish did not total 2,000 words.

The schedule was 8–9:30, 10–11:30, 12:30–2, 2:30–4, or four 1.5 hour sessions. I got behind early and never caught up. In fact, I kept getting further and further behind, until I finished the second session at almost 8:30 last night. (Today appears to be headed in an even worse direction. Here’s hoping I can pull myself out of this spiral.)

Daily average since 9/19: 967 words.

The next book: writing plans

Lynn

I’ve started my next book. At this point, I’m 12,606 words into it. I’ve also started another book (and have two others already started, too), but I’m not going to let myself work on it except when I’ve already finished my goals for the current book. See my previous post about writing one book at a time for reasons.

It’s important that I keep my interest level high on this book because it has a tight deadline. It had an even tighter deadline, but I had to nix that one. See another previous post for those reasons. :)

I’m aiming for about 63,000 words on this book.

The median word count for the series is 67,886 and the average word count is 67,655.

The books range in length from just over 50,000 words to just over 85,000. It’s a pretty big range, to be honest, but I can’t seem to control for length when I’m writing. I wanted them all to be 50,000 but we see how that worked out. :D

I started this book estimating 50,000 words, realized that just wasn’t probable, and raised it to 68,000 after seeing those numbers. Now I’ve backed off, because I actually want it to be closer to 60,000 and I don’t want to set myself up for writing a longer book just by default.

At this point, here’s what I need to finish by 11/30/2016, which is the date I’d like to finish: 3,150 words a day (average).

I’m going to keep this post updated with my progress, although it’ll probably be in batches instead of a daily update.

Word count post for Nov. 14, 2016

Lynn

224 words.

So disappointing, considering my goal yesterday.

Daily average since 9/19: 952 words.

I spent last night figuring out just what I would need to do to finish the book I’m working on in the time I have left, realized it was a fool’s dream considering my actual track record, and came up with a new plan, something that still pushes me to do better than I have before, but something that’s not so far outside the realm of possibility.

So I have a new plan for this book. One I feel pretty good about it. I’ll detail it in a post of it’s own, because this is a word count post, not a goal post. ;)

Word count post for Nov. 13, 2016

Lynn

3,113 words.

Daily average since 9/19: 965 words.

I’m 57,002 words down from 9/19 and a 2,000 word average. That sounds pretty bad, but doing the numbers made me realize I can recover from this in less than 90 days with just an additional 635 words a day. So although I’m not making the catch up for words a priority, it is nice to know it’s not some insurmountable goal. And it’s reachable with no change in plan at all, because my plan is to have more average and moderate word days than not and monitor my average to see how well I’m doing. As long as I don’t reset my start date (9/19, which I’m not planning to do), a 2,000 word average will mean I’ve recovered.

I’ve let myself get behind—by a lot

Lynn

I have a deadline coming up, very much a “can’t miss this date” deadline. It’s making me anxious.

I mean, technically, I could miss it. The date is still listed as tentative, but in my head, I know it’s not a deadline I need to miss. I don’t want to miss it. The fact is, though, that it’s really getting beyond my current capabilities to reach unless I have some kind of breakthrough in my writing.

So here I go trying to force that breakthrough.

I’ve found a schedule I don’t remember having tried before, and I’m going to try it today.

It pushes my pace a little bit, but nothing out of reach (~667 wph needed to stay on track). Where I’ll have the most trouble is just focusing on start and end times for my sessions and actually doing them when I’m supposed to do them. Five minutes late getting started is no big deal, but my history shows that I tend to get behind early, start every session late, until it’s snowballed and I’ve eliminated massive swaths of writing time just by letting five minutes here and there become twenty.

Here’s the plan.

1.5 hour writing sessions where the goal is 1,000 words each session. (Yes, I’ve tried this part before.)
.5 hour breaks between sessions (This is where it’s different. The writing sessions are all evenly spaced all day long.)

Here’s where I’ll update results.

12:00–1:30 – 1,296 words – Woo hoo! Things are off to a good start.
2:00–3:30 – 977 words – Only 1.23 hours, because I’ve fallen pretty far behind. I’ll have to skip the next session to get back on track. I’m hoping I can get ahead with some better word counts for the next couple of sessions. I had just enough time before 6 to finish it off before I started that one. :)
4:00–5:30 – Skipped to catch up
6:00–7:30 – 840 words – I’ve fallen behind again. It’s 8:17 and I have half an hour on this one to go. I’m going to keep going with it at this point.
8:00–9:30 – Skipped, because I was still working on the previous session.
10:00–11:30 – Skipped because I’m exhausted and I’m going to bed early so I can start off strong tomorrow.

If I get behind, I’ll cut a session or break short and move on to the next session.

If this goes well, I’m going to try it again tomorrow, starting earlier and taking a full hour between sessions (if I want—it certainly won’t be mandatory). The only reason I’m not doing that today is that I’m starting so much later than I planned when I came up with this idea last night.

Now, gotta go. I’m already 15 minutes behind. Yeah, I know. Not kidding. :o

**This might seem like it hasn’t gone well, but considering how badly I fail at this and how often, I’m actually really pleased with what I accomplished using this schedule. I’m definitely going to try the slightly modified version tomorrow, with the hour between sessions and see how that goes. I don’t yet know if the longer breaks will help or hinder my ability to stay on track.

Word count post for Nov. 10–11, 2016

Lynn

Nov. 10: 2,369
Nov. 11: 2,612

Daily average since 9/19: 922 words.

The average is going up again! Finally.

On these days, I had two false starts on my attempt to write 6,000 words in a day, but today I plan to try that again. Interruptions, distractions, and my own inability to get past those things severely affected the time I spent writing, while my inability to stop tinkering with my words kept my pace too slow and stopped me from gaining any momentum.

Can I write 6,000 words today?

Lynn

No? Yes? Maybe?

The plan: three blocks of writing time that last three hours each, during which I need to write 2,000 words so I end up with 6,000 words total for the day.

8:30 to 11:30 – 1,162 words

12:30 to 2 – Make up time.

2 to 5 – Was 1 to 4 until I added make up time.

7 to 10 –

Yesterday’s writing challenge a bust—much like the election

Lynn

As someone who voted Libertarian in this election, I’ll just say that the candidate representing me didn’t win. No surprise there.

The fact that I didn’t spend the day writing? Very much a surprise. I fully expected myself to be able to concentrate enough to write—but I just couldn’t get started.

Today I’d like to try again. The only problem is that it’s already 1:20 pm. I stayed up WAY too late into the early morning watching the election results. I had to make up that sleep time because I felt terrible when I tried to get up at 6:30 in the morning. I went back to sleep until about 8:30, but I still feel pretty bad, and I have a headache that comes from a rough, and late, night of sleep.

Anyway, I’m going to give it a try today despite the last start. Can’t win if you don’t play, as they say, and there’s always an available excuse for not playing.

All the points of the challenge remain the same, except for the timing of the three 3-hour blocks.

But three 3-hour blocks is still the plan.

See you back here at the end of block #1. I’ll update below!

Block #1
1.5 hours: 398 words