Tag: Writing fiction

I write fiction—it’s how I earn my living—and I like to ramble. Just so you know. Nearly everything I do these days relates in some way to writing and publishing, so most of my posts are here.

That’s funny

Lynn

So far today I’ve written 664 words in 1.75 hours. That’s 379 words an hour. Considering I deleted a nice little chunk of words in my second session this afternoon, I’m not too disappointed.

Words left to write today = 893

Hours needed to write them @ 379 wph = 2.353539157

I’d like to do those words at 600 wph or better, because then I can move on to catching up a few days’ word counts where I didn’t reach my minimum. Of course, here it is 3:57 pm and I’m just now reaching 1.75 hours completed, so that could be a problem. Anyway, onward and upward one hopes. :D

Today’s title courtesy of the fact that I forgot to title the post and that was the first phrase that popped into my head.

Update: I finished off the day with 1,616 words and it took me 3.5 hours of timed writing to write them. Not great, but not my worst effort to be sure. :D

Revisiting yesterday’s plan—but not

Lynn

I’m going to keep an open mind with today’s writing, because it’s possible I might want to try again for a record setting day, despite the fact that I have the AC guy coming to repair my unit. (Which is now working again, but which I just know will quit the moment I cancel him, so I’m just going to let him come and do maintenance on the thing. It seems to need it every year, and if anyone ever asked me, I’d say yes, my geothermal unit has save me a lot on my electric bill but most definitely not on my nerves or my home maintenance costs.)

The reason I say open mind is that I’m just not sure actually planning the thing isn’t partially to blame for me not writing yesterday.

I’ve found success with the 1,557 word daily minimum. Jumping right into higher word count challenges might be self-sabotaging behavior—or at the least, seriously counterproductive!

So today I will write my minimum and go from there. Once I do today’s minimum, I might finish off yesterday’s minimum. Once I do that, I might go back to the next day where I didn’t finish my minimum and do that one too. And if at the end of the day, that leads me to a record setting word count, I might celebrate.

Sounds like a good plan for the day to me.

Hmm. Anything else? Oh, yes.

I’ll be sticking with 15 minute sessions today so I can keep an eye on my speed. I’ll be trying to reach 250 words at least once today during those sessions. 250 is a big number for me, and I know I can hit it but I don’t do it often. So, yeah, it’s a challenge, but a tiny one. :D

Update: It’s down to the wire. I have 30 minutes to finish 440 words, unfortunately. Might be a problem because my last several sessions have been in the 200–300 wph range. I don’t even know why I’m taking time to write this except that I had a compulsion to do it. Anyway, getting back to it so I can get those 440 words asap.

Update two: I wrote until just a little later than midnight because I was so close that I couldn’t let my day end without reaching that 1,557 words. I did! I came in at 1,661 and 3.5 hours of timed writing. I just can’t believe how difficult I find it to accumulate those hours of writing time over the course of a day. This is something that’s bugged me for years. I just can’t figure it out.

Update three: Ha! You thought I forgot about the challenge, huh? I did. Sorry. The fact is I didn’t make it to 250 words in any of my sessions. My closest came in at 179, I think. (I deleted the log before I remembered I was supposed to be keeping up.)

Big plans for today

Lynn

Okay, I haven’t taken the opportunity to push for a record day in a while, so I want to do that today. It’s a perfect day for it. The house is empty and I have no one here to distract me, only myself (who is, let’s be honest, the biggest problem), but I’m going to overcome that by turning off WIFI for at least a few hours.

My best word count for one day is 5,816. So today I’m going to take aim at 6,000 again and see if I can get there.

My plan is simple if tough, because I don’t focus well for long periods of time.

I’m going to do 45 minute sessions and I’m hoping for an average of 800 wph for each of them. I know! My average on this book hasn’t been anywhere near that, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. And I have done 800 wph plenty of times (just not many lately) so I know it’s not out of my range.

After 2 sessions, I’ll evaluate whether or not I’m going forward with this plan today. I’m not going to set myself up for a frustrating day of failure, so at that point I might scale it back if things look dire. I’ll know within a couple of sessions if I’m able to write fast enough today to make this possible.

Now, off for breakfast, so I can get started with this as soon as possible. I’ve somehow managed to spend all morning doing spreadsheet calculations and thought experiments. Time for some action!

Had a plan; how about this summary instead?

Lynn

On Tuesday the 11th, I decided to set a daily minimum word count and start writing 1,557 words every day. I began following that rule on the 12th. Overall, this is one experiment that seems to be working out well.

Here are my word counts for the last 7 days, beginning with July 12.

1,667
935
1,628
1,969
405
1,562
1,615

That’s an 80% completion rate, which is pretty damn good in my book.

The reason for today’s title is this: today’s word count sits at 402 words and it’s 10:15 pm. I had a plan for today, but I didn’t follow through. I don’t have a good reason for that, but I’m sitting here thinking I might still have time to finish today’s minimum word count if I start now. In truth, this is probably a perfect example of the thinking I talked about in yesterday’s morning post.

But I really think I could possibly still make it. So of course I’m going to have to try now or I’ll regret it. And if I don’t, well, at least I can be somewhat certain I’ll end up with more words than I started with.

(And I ended with 688 words. Although I didn’t make it to my minimum before 12, I’m glad I tried.)

Doing 15 minute sessions back-to-back

Lynn

Today’s plan is to do 15 minute sessions back-to-back and only take a break when I have to. Knowing me, I’ll probably have to much too often, but at least now that I’m writing in the dining room again, I seem to be able to get back to it pretty quickly when no one else is around (and no one else is around today). :D

I’m thinking 12 sessions would be a good number, since that’d put me at 3 hours, which is probably what I’ll need to get my 1,557 words today, because I’ve needed at least that long the last 4 days. So onward! I’ll update this post as I go. :D

I ended up with just over 1600 words for the day, although I can’t say exactly how many because I’m writing this update on my phone from my bed. :D I forgot to update last night and wanted to do it before I got busy with today’s writing. The exact number doesn’t matter anyway. It was another win and it feels fantastic. ;)

Using the stopwatch instead of the timer—and epiphanies

Lynn

So today I’m writing with my little timer software set to the stopwatch instead of the timer. I’ve started each session with the intention of writing until something distracts me. Surprisingly, my session lengths have been pretty regular.

This is an experiment, really, because I’ve tried straight-up timing my sessions before (versus using the timer to limit session length) and I didn’t have much luck with it. It was time to give it another try, and I’m pleased with how it’s working out.

Session 1

30 minutes. 384 words. 768 wph. I stopped because my phone dinged with a message in Hangouts.

Session 2

36 minutes. 214 words. 357 wph. Too much cycling and editing of session 1 words.

Session 3

25 minutes. 98 words. 235 wph. Way too much editing of the words from sessions 1 and 2.

Session 4

20 minutes. 106 words. 318 wph. I stopped because I’ve been drinking too much tea this morning and I had no choice. :D

Sessions 5–7

43 minutes. 399 words. 557 wph. Frustration with my plot stopped me this time. I had to have a break or I was going to break something. :D

35 minutes. 281 words. 489 wph. More plot frustrations!

16 minutes. 212 words. 795 wph. Stopped by the phone ding again.

I’ve reached my day’s minimum word count.

It should not have taken me all day to do 3.4 hours of writing, but it really did. I made a note of the start time in my journal, and it was 11:19 am. I ended session 7 at 6:52 pm. So for 3.4 hours of writing, I used about 7.5 hours of the day. I wrote out a (ridiculously) long summary of where my time went and it made me realize my expectations of how much actual, focused time I can get out of 7.5 hours in the middle of the day might be unrealistic.

Getting my expectations in line with reality might go a long way toward keeping me from coming up with ridiculous plans for myself that I have no hope of following through on. Grandiose plans, I think that book The 7 Secrets of the Prolific called them. (It was a good book, if you haven’t read it.)

Yes, I make grandiose plans. I use math to support those plans, and I never build in the time I need for writing these posts, making my notes by hand, or anything else that probably uses up significant chunks of untracked time.*

I’d like to come up with some ideas of how I can stop that from happening, but the only things coming to mind are things I’ve tried a thousand times before and found completely ineffective. And I’m not willing to make myself stop these posts. Although I should probably give some serious thought to trimming them down to basics. I ramble. A lot. And talk about stuff that doesn’t really matter. Mostly because I think better when I’m writing things out, and it’s also easier for me to remember things I’ve written out.

Anyway, I should end this post, because I’ve actually been at it since (*holy shit) 9:04 pm and it’s now 10:04. There you go, an answer to the question of what happens to all that time I lose during the day when I’m writing.

These posts really do use up significant chunks of time. This could explain why my best month ever of writing consistently was February 2013, where there’s a distinct lack of posts here on this blog (as in, none) because I wouldn’t let myself get online before I’d finished my day’s writing and by the time I was done, I just didn’t want to write anymore. (See this lone March 2013 post for February’s numbers. Ignore the rest of the post for the sake of my pride. :D)

Anyway, I now have more to think about than ever. It’s starting to look like the more I write here, the less I write there, and that’s not a good thing at all. In a sense, I’m using up my writing energy writing everything except my books.

I need new habits that prioritize my fiction writing. So tomorrow I’m going to start a little experiment. No more wordy blog posts for a while, and not even an unwordy one unless I’ve finished my day’s writing. I’ll give it a while (a week, maybe two) and see if it makes any difference, good or bad.

Session totals

  1. 384
  2. 214
  3. 98
  4. 106
  5. 399
  6. 281
  7. 212
  • 1,694 words
  • in 3.4 hours
  • for a pace of 498 wph

In fact, looking at this post now, it’s 724 words long! Seriously, ugh.

Maybe I can get into flow and stay there

Lynn

The title was a note to myself from my notebook about trying 60 minute sessions (yesterday). :)

Session 1

I wrote 535 words, which means I’m on track to finish today’s minimum word count in less than 3 hours of timed writing. Yay! I have 1,022 words to go. :)

Session 2

I wrote 380 words, bringing my pace down to 458 words an hour. :(

Also, I am not loving these 60 minute sessions. I thought I’d give them another shot today, but I’m done. The next session will not be 60 minutes. They’re just not working for me and I don’t want to sabotage the rest of the night’s writing. (Because, yes, somehow it became 6:49 pm while I wasn’t looking.)

I have 642 words left to write and it’ll take an estimated 1.40 hours to do it.

Session 3

Despite saying otherwise, this session was 60 minutes long. I wrote even fewer words this time than last—only 313 words.

I moved to the living room and did them on the couch, and although it’s helping me relax more, it’s not helping my writing! I just can’t get comfortable today for writing. {ugghhhh}

A lot of my problem is caused by a side-effect of that home maintenance project I did on Monday and Tuesday. I am terribly allergic to mosquito bites. And I have what feels like a bazillion of them, courtesy of that stupid project. And the itching is driving me up the wall. Feels like I’ve been in contact with poison ivy! If I’d thought for a moment mosquitoes were going to be a problem I’d have hosed myself down in insect repellent but it never even occurred to me to worry about mosquitoes.

Anyway, better get busy with those last 329 words I need. It’s 10:29 and I’ve committed to ending my writing days at the stroke of midnight. I might sometimes keep writing, but anything after 12:00 pm sharp will not go into the previous day’s count.

If I want to reach my minimum for today, I only have 1.5 hours to do it.

Sessions 4–6

I finally abandoned the 60 minute sessions. These sessions were 20, 20, and 13 minutes long. I wrote 400 words exactly for a total of 1,628 words today.

Which, whew, because I really wanted to finish my minimum word count for the day. :D

Session totals

  1. 535
  2. 380
  3. 313
  4. 67
  5. 217
  6. 116

Sessions 1–3 were 60 minutes, and sessions 4–5 were 20 minutes, while session 6 was 13 minutes.

  • 1,628 total words
  • in 3.883 hours
  • for a pace of 419 words per hour

The hell if I know why that number of hours took me all day, but that’s pretty much how it is the majority of the time, so I guess I should quit being surprised by this.

See you back here tomorrow.

“What’s this?”

Lynn

Today’s title is brought to you by my journal and is nothing more than a note to myself of a line of dialogue so I’ll remember to add in something important that I appear to have forgotten about in yesterday’s work. :D

Session 1

So today I’m trying longer sessions. I’m in a position here in the dining room that makes it more likely they’ll work for me. I’m doing 60 minutes at a time, and I’m a little disappointed at my first session results of 327 words.

The low count could have been because of the scene I’m working through, or it could be that I end up slowing down with longer sessions. I don’t know. I felt like my mind wasn’t wandering, and that the writing sped up and slowed down in normal patterns, so who knows what it was. I’m going to let it ride for the moment.

I have 1,230 words left to write, and my spreadsheet says I’ll have to write for 3.76 more hours to do it at my current pace. (327 words an hour isn’t very fast!)

Session 2

I wrote 462 words in 60 minutes, bringing my pace up to 395 words an hour. So I’m still seriously under-performing, but maybe it’s just because I’ve been away from writing for so long.

It’s also much later in the day at this point than I wanted it to be. However, my spreadsheet now says I need only 1.95 more hours of writing to reach 1,557 words today and I know I can do that.

In the 117 days prior to the restart of this book, I wrote only 2,115 words of fiction in total. That’s almost 4 months of nada. It makes sense that I need to get myself back up to speed.

Anyway, back to it. I have 768 words left to write and after a break I’m going to do my damnedest to write them all in the next session!

Session 3

Well, this sucks. I’m exhausted (and in pain) from the project I started during my break between sessions. I wrote 146 words in 33 minutes, realized it was after midnight, and decided to call it.

I would’ve had time to finish this if that project hadn’t taken 3 hours instead of the 30 minutes I estimated (moving furniture, a computer, etc). Then I had to help out one of my kids with something and listen to said kid talk for nearly an hour about stuff he really should have talked to me about when I was on a break.

What this session made me realize was that I need a cutoff time. Midnight seems perfectly appropriate, so tonight and in the future, if I haven’t finished my words by midnight, I haven’t finished my words for the day.

It’s better this way. Otherwise I’ll guilt myself into staying up super late trying to finish and the next day will suffer.

Anyway, I’m disappointed in myself for not finishing these words tonight. No more big projects as breaks when I’m writing.

  1. 327
  2. 462
  3. 146 (not a full session)
  • 935 words
  • in 2.44 hours
  • for a pace of 368 wph

Knife is in which boot?

Lynn

Sessions 4–5

These two sessions dragged down my pace, which is a bummer, because I’d really wanted to pull off a miracle, write faster than I’ve written all day, and finish my minimum words in the three hours I should be able to finish them. Didn’t happen.

I wrote 252 words in session 4 and only 154 words in session 5. My pace is now 378 words an hour today. Which is way below average.

So I’ll be doing more sessions. But first, dinner. All this brain work has made me hungry. ;)

Oh, and that title? Straight off the notebook page open beside me. I have no idea what’s going on in this book but I really need to figure it out soon. ;D

Session 6

So slow! I’m really dragging here. I don’t feel draggy, just the words aren’t coming easily and the plot is dragging me down. I think when I go back I’m going to move on whether my characters are ready or not because I sure am. I’m ready for some action! ;D

This one got me only 127 words closer to my minimum and knocked my pace down to 350 words an hour. Which stinks. Like a skunk.

I’m really going to have to push for this one to be the last because I don’t want to stay up late tonight for this.

Session 7

I wrote 274 words in 36 minutes and my pace is now 365 words an hour.

There’s not a lot else to say. My total is up to 1534 now and I’m going to write just a few more minutes to get to my daily minimum and then I’m calling it done. :D

Session totals

  1. 247
  2. 144
  3. 336
  4. 252
  5. 154
  6. 127
  7. 274
  8. 48 (not a full session)
  • 1,582 total words
  • in 4.4 hours
  • for a pace of 360 words per hour

You know what’s funny? I found it easier to go past 4 hours today, aiming for this smaller number of words, than it has been any of the times I’ve been aiming for 3,000.

Challenge day eight (seriously!)

Lynn

This could take all month! Yesterday, unfortunately, I really underestimated how long the taxes thing would take. I left at 11 am and returned at 4:30 pm. By the time I ate an early supper, it was 5:30 and I was so brain tired I had a difficult time even thinking about getting started again.

I came not even close to 6,000 words yesterday.

Today I am at it again. It’s 10:23 am, I’m about to go make my hot honey lemon water for a boost, and I’ve already spent 1 hour and 20 minutes writing.

Sadly, that’s added up to a very paltry 107 words! I am so off my pace I can’t even understand what’s going on. Last night, I had a 52 minute stretch where I averaged less than one word per minute when all was said and done. I know I wrote more than that, but it was write, delete, write, delete, write, delete until all I’d done was increase my word count by 50 words.

I just cannot figure out why my pace is so bad on this book. I’m dealing with SO MUCH hesitation with everything I write for it that I’m spending TONS of time editing/cycling through/rewriting as I go. I just can’t get a handle on it.

I have a dentist appointment today that’s really going to mess up my day, but I’m going to do my best to finish out the day with 7 more hours at 842 words per hour.

For that to happen, something’s really going to have to break loose soon, but I am ever hopeful.

Going too far afield (challenge update)

Lynn

I’m afraid I’m going to lose some words today. The current material is going too far afield of the scenes I’ve already written. I had hoped they would join up but now it’s not looking good for that possibility.

I’m at 965 words for the morning and I’m still trying to reach 2000 before lunch. That’s with 2 hours and 5 minutes of writing. I’ve been careful of breaks but obviously I’m still losing time somewhere. I got started at 8:36 and it’s 11:15 now.

Back to the book. Too much to do to tinker.

Too much second guessing (challenge update)

Lynn

It’s obvious to me that one big problem for me when it comes to speed is the speed at which I second guess my choices.

Today’s attempt to cross that 6,000 word barrier has been hampered at every turn by my tendency to write something, then write something else, then delete something, then delete something else, then rewrite the first something I wrote, before deleting it and starting the whole process over again.

That’s not the way to gather speed and momentum.

It’s 7:53 pm and I’ve let myself turn on WiFi on my computer so I can write this update. I knew it would be much faster than trying to do it on my phone and even though I have only written 1,225 words today, I’m still hopeful of more.

However, 6,000 words is probably shooting for the moon when I have no rocket.

For today.

For tomorrow, well, tomorrow hasn’t started yet. We’ll have to see about that.

For now, I’m signing off. I have more words to write, even if meeting the 6,000 word challenge is beyond me tonight. I’ll start this thing again in the morning and see how it goes.

First priority? Stop second guessing everything I put on the page.

Challenge morning three

Lynn

I’m just going to keep trying until I get there. Yesterday I fell far short of 6,000 words, so here I go again. (A phrase that totally just played through my head with music.)

I’ve had breakfast and I have my hot honey lemon water beside me and my WiFi off.

Estimated time to completion is again 10 hours. The last two days I’ve clocked in at just under 7 and enjoyed most of them so I can do this!

Also, it became very clear to me this morning why I’ve been writing so slowly but I’ll have to explain that later. Typing on my phone is much too slow.

Too little momentum (challenge update)

Lynn

I’m just shy of 2,000 words and it’s taken me just over five hours to get there.

I’m doing better than yesterday, but nowhere near good enough to reach 6,000 words by my bedtime today unless something changes significantly.

I do expect to finish today with a much better word count than yesterday though.

One thing I’m sure has hurt me is that I came up about 2 hours short on sleep last night. I’m already feeling run down. Then I started writing almost an hour later today than yesterday.

Slow going (challenge update)

Lynn

By 9:51 this morning I had spent 1 hour and 12 minutes writing and reached 424 words after starting with a 145 word deficit from a last minute deletion last night.

I’m not unhappy with that, really, but it wasn’t really what I was hoping for either so, since I was dragging a bit, I went ahead and took an early lunch.

I’m back now and ready to try again. 

Ten hours is a lot and I really need to avoid any extra breaks today to reach it, but I’m definitely hoping ten hours might not be necessary to reach 6,000 words. :)

Challenge morning redux

Lynn

It’s 8:14 am, I have my hot honey lemon water next to me, and my computer set to power saver mode to maximize the battery.

I did get up early again today but I’ve been dragging a bit. NPR.org is definitely going to have to go onto my no read list for my web reading challenge. It’s turning into a crutch for me when I’m seeking out easy distractions.

Time to write. :)

Oh, and I added the WordPress app to my phone and it’s so much easier than using the phone browser, despite how good the mobile site is. I’m very happy with the change so far.

Giving up on the dream—but only for today (challenge update)

Lynn

I’ll have to try again tomorrow to break through the 6,000 word ceiling I seem to have. Although admittedly, it felt more like a 1,000 word ceiling today!

I logged about 7 solid hours of writing (sans interruptions, breaks, etc) and still have only managed to reach 1,495 words for the day. I’ll continue writing up until I’m ready to go to sleep, but there’s no way I’m meeting the 6,000 words challenge by then. I want to get up early again tomorrow, and that means getting to bed soon enough. I might write another 30 minutes, all told, before I call it a night.

I have to say, the writing wasn’t difficult despite the challenge I had with speed. I’ve been trying to find my way. Sometimes that’s slow going. I’ve been having difficulties with this scene and the ones that follow (some are written, as I mentioned in another post, and I’m just hoping they’ll join up when the time comes) and because of that I’ve put off working my way through it when I should have just tried to keep going even if it meant slow days.

That’s a problem with chasing speed. On days when things just can’t go fast, it becomes easier to do nothing than to face what feels like failure.

I feel like today was a mix of success and failure. Failure to reach 6,000, obviously, but success in getting back in the groove of all day writing and actually enjoying it.

It was a fun day.

And I’ll see you again tomorrow as I try this thing one more time.

Remaining hopeful despite bleak numbers (challenge update)

Lynn

I’m remaining hopeful despite the  bleak numbers because I have at least made it to almost 1000 words today. The fact that it has taken me over 4 hours to get there is irrelevant. (4 hours of writing, not just 4 hours ununfortunately.)

I will carry on until the end because sometimes writing is slow and sometimes it isn’t. A couple of good hours could really turn things around.

 

Uh oh! (challenge update)

Lynn

Here is my first challenge update.

I’m way behind already.

After 1 hour and 49 minutes, I’m only up by 149 words.

Getting through the last of the material I wrote a few weeks ago is taking too long. Perfectionism? Probably. I’m going to try to get through the rest of it faster.

As of right now I still have the computer WIFI off. I’m writing this on my phone. It’s easier to do all new posts on my phone than edit a really long one so I expect all updates to this challenge will be separate posts today.

Be back later. :)

Hopefully with better numbers!

Challenge morning

Lynn

So I’m typing this out on my Kindle Fire because I decided last night that I would turn off my computer WIFI and start the day without it. I plan to stick to that.

I’m up early. It’s 7:05, and I have a bowl of cereal next to me to finish, then it’s on to writing. Wish me luck. I’m going to need it. :)