Category: Writing

** 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.

I wrote 1,577 words this morning—but I almost didn’t. At 51 minutes left on the timer, I was only about 100 words from my projected minimum (1,084 words at 500 wph) and I thought seriously about quitting as soon as I hit it. I hadn’t made up my mind when I passed that number but I wasn’t paying close attention to the timer and the next time I stopped it, it was at 21 minutes. I decided to work on my last paragraph just a bit more and restarted it. Then at 10 minutes left, I was over 1,300 words and I was so close to giving up, but… I only had 10 minutes left after all so I managed to convince myself to persevere, so I doubled checked a plot issue that crosses over from the last book to this one and by the time the timer went off, I’d written another couple hundred words. Yay!

I enjoyed a successful morning and that’s even including a phone call from my sister. I really like talking to my family and I almost never turn them away. So… I just have to work around it.

I admit, 8:55 am to 12:50 pm for 2 hours and 10 minutes of writing isn’t exactly efficient, but it seems to be about the best I can do. :o I really should have started at 7:30 and this morning I’m not really sure why I didn’t. Oh well. I’m happy and I have a long break ahead of me regardless because 7:30 pm is still many hours away! Toodle-ooh. :D

So, today I’m really going to push for that second session tonight. I did manage to pull up my morning pace so that I finished only 65 words under my minimum. I wrote 1,019 words this morning. If things go okay tonight, I might be able to make that up without too much trouble and end the day where I’m hoping to end it: >2,000 words!

But I am taking a break because my head feels funny and I can’t concentrate. I had to turn the heat up. I also had a really strange dizzy spell, while sitting down!, but I think it’s because I’m still phlegmy from that cold (or another one, who knows at this point), and it’s possible I’m having some ear trouble.

Anyway, that’s just to say I’m having trouble staying in my story and my mind keeps wandering. I’m going to give myself 5 more minutes and then I’m getting back to work to try to plow through the hour and twenty minutes I have left of this morning session. I’m bummed because my pace right now is only 371 wph so if I don’t pick up speed, I’m not going to reach my minimum for this morning’s writing. Wish me luck. :)

I wrote 153 words today and every bit of that was the 23 minutes I needed to catch up from yesterday. After that, I had planned to write at 7:30 pm, but I never got started.

I’m noticing a pattern here. I think I’m going to have to push for the time in the evening because I’m not doing it just because I ought to. Finally, the morning time is really going to have to be the one session I prioritize every single day because if I don’t do it, I don’t seem to do much writing at all.

Now, to figure out how I’m going to push for that evening time… My current habits don’t seem to want to give way for it (and that’s probably the biggest problem with it, but I’d LOVE to be able to make it work as is).

One last note. I found out today that my toddler niece has the flu. Yesterday she sat directly across from me at a small card table and coughed in my direction more than once. I knew she wasn’t feeling well but I didn’t imagine she had the flu, poor thing. Either way though, I have my fingers crossed that I haven’t caught the flu. I really meant to get the flu shot this year and I just never got around to it. According to the CDC, it could take 1 to 4 days to show symptoms, with 2 days being average. You can bet I’ll be watching with an eagle eye for any signs of illness!

Still, I better get on the ball tomorrow and get some decent word counts in because I definitely need to build up a buffer. This is not a month in which I want to fall behind.

I wrote 244 words yesterday. I lost a lot of time to a scene I wrote the day before. In an hour I’d managed only to add 52 more words than I deleted. The scene didn’t need that kind of work, either, so that’s kind of a bummer.

I’m not getting sucked into that again until the final read through (when it’s possible I’ll ignore it then too). :D

I came up short about 20 minutes on my morning time, so I’m going to make that up today before I start this morning’s time.

My average since I got back on the daily writing wagon is still over 1,000 words a day. If I can push myself to start hitting that evening session (still haven’t done it), that’ll double my word count and push me past the 2,000 a day average mark. Good luck me! :D

Hmm. Although I wrote 1,103 words today, I’m noticing that I’m spending a lot of time in the afternoons and evenings watching television instead of doing something more important (like reading! writing! or publishing tasks!).

That said, I’ve made it to day 5 of this streak with an average of over 1,000 words a day. Now to convert that to 2,000 words a day without derailing my progress. I think I’ll let it ride just a little longer before I mess with the good thing I’ve got going here.

What is it I have going here? Well, I’m writing in the mornings and planning to write in the evenings. I say planning because I haven’t actually done any writing in the evenings yet. My routine is simple: I write for 2 hours 10 minutes in the morning first thing, and then write for 2 hours 10 minutes in the evening last thing (start around 7:30 am and 7:30 pm). This leaves the vast majority of my day completely free. :) I am loving it.

I have a reason for the 2 hours 10 minutes but I’m not going to bore you. Suffice to say, it’s on a spreadsheet and it’s a very dynamic number that I’ll revisit monthly, assuming I’m able to stick with this one for a while. :)