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

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. ;)