Tag: Lessons learned

Who knows what day of book 19

Lynn

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.

A small win last night that bodes well

Lynn

Yesterday I somehow made it until nearly 1:00 a.m. without writing. But I was determined not to break my 500 words a day streak so I finally overcame the resistance to getting started and sat down and wrote.

Instead of 500 words, I ended up with 1,004. Considering I didn’t use a timer and honestly only intended to get 500 words and then go to sleep, I think that’s pretty amazing. I went to sleep around 2:20 and don’t feel so hot this morning, of course, because I’ve now had two nights in a row of about six hours of sleep, but I feel great that I had that small win turn into a big win.

After four days of the 500 word minimum, my daily average of 644 words is already better than my all time daily average of 614.

This is exactly the result I was hoping to see. It only takes a few days of better than 500 words a day to start pumping up my average. And 500 a day feels like such a doable number of words. It’s enough of a commitment to writing each day to make me feel accomplished and it also seems to be enough words to set off the creative part of my brain so that I’m actually getting somewhere instead of just staying stuck in place.

What I mean by that is that with say 100 words, I can often add a little here and there and never actually move the story forward. I might be able to get away with editing enough words into a scene to reach 500 words once, maybe twice if the writing was thin to begin with, but after that, I have to move forward, which is what happened last night. Once I started moving forward, I didn’t even have to work to pick up momentum. The story was pulling me forward.

Now, despite all that success after midnight last night, I don’t want to repeat the after midnight part tonight, so I’m going to go write. This story is actually interesting me again, and I feel a need to make some more progress on that never-ending ending I’ve got going on! I’ll post later with results, unless I fall asleep at the keyboard. :D

Funny how negotiable non-negotiable is when you’re tired

Lynn

Boy was I tired last night. I think I used up all my energy writing up that blog post about resistance because when I was done, I almost fell asleep holding my computer.

One thing led to another and I just gave up. I couldn’t even handwrite the notes I wanted to make about one of my characters. I need to do some brainstorming on that or something because I’m really not feeling the love for him and he is supposed to be a major player in this book. {grrr}

Anyway, not going to do that again, but if I do, I’ll forgive myself like I’m going to forgive myself now. I had an especially trying two days and a home maintenance project going that involved concrete and buckets and 85°F heat, and I didn’t get nearly enough sleep the night before. It’s no wonder I conked out.

What this all means is that although I wanted yesterday to be the first day of my newly refreshed plan, it wasn’t.

If I had it to do differently, I would have started writing a lot sooner in the day, even if it was just 15 minutes here and there.

It’s a lesson, in a long line of lessons, trying to teach me to start my writing day as early as I can.

Which I’m going to do right now. :)