Didn’t finish the book but I did break the record

Yesterday, I was trying both to break my one-day word count record and finish a book. I didn’t finish the book, but I did break the record. I wrote 5,758 words yesterday! I’m very proud of them. :)

Today I try again to finish this book. I think I can. It feels like I’m almost there. Then again, I did say that yesterday too but the scenes I wrote didn’t seem to move me much closer to the end.

Whatever I do, I’ll be working on getting my 4,558 words today so if I do finish the book today, I can take the next 3–5 days off writing to spend time publishing stuff.

I have a short story that’s either going to be published or scrapped (I’m not sure the plot makes sense, at all, and I need a fresh read before I decide if I want to start it over completely at some point, or go ahead with publishing), a novel to proof, cover to make, blurbs to write, paperback to layout, and one paperback cover to complete for my pen name book (paper layout is done, just been waiting to finish the cover for an entire month!).

I’m going to have to finish it all in those 3 to 5 days. 3 is all I’ve allowed for publishing. The extra 2 would pull from my days-off-writing allowance. (I’ve built in 4 weekend days off each month to my word count goals. Of course, I’ll still write something on every day off, just to keep my “no more zero word days” streak alive. ;) But there’s a big difference between writing 50 to 100 words and aiming for 4,558!)

And, that’s got to be a wrap so I can get started. I’m already slipping into old habits of writing crazy long blog posts about random stuff to keep from having to shut off my WIFI.

So, WIFI off!

What is a reasonable daily word count goal?

I had to spend some time researching this, because the fact is, I have no idea how to set reasonable goals for myself. In the end, I didn’t find much helpful information out there and that’s probably because the answer depends on who’s asking the question.

In trying to nail down a reasonable goal for myself, I’m looking at a few different things.

  1. How many hours I have available to write. (Lots.)
  2. How much of my time is lost to breaks. (So, so much. Too much.)
  3. How much I can reasonably write in that time. (Not so much if past is a predictor of future performance—but does it have to be?)

I’ve decided that studying the past and looking at averages isn’t a good idea for me. I mean, the whole purpose of this is to give me a number I can aim for each day, but a number that’s not out of my reach. Something that I can legitimately expect from myself, not a number that is a hoped for but not often attained goal. I want this reasonable number to be something that will force me to face facts. Am I putting enough effort into my daily writing?

So, if I answer with as much honesty as I can squeeze out of myself, this is what I come up with.

  1. I have to explain this answer. Writing is both a work and leisure activity for me. What that means is that I’m just as happy doing it as any other leisure activity, as a general rule. Not to say there aren’t times when I’d rather be doing something else, but it’s at least as important to me as anything else I relax with. So, when I take out sleep time, personal hygiene activities, and chores (the least I can possibly get away with because life is short and I hate chores and I’m actually fairly efficient at getting them done quickly) I end up with about 14 hours.
    24 − 8.25 − 1 − .5 = 14.25
    It’s too much to expect myself to spend all this time writing, but it’s a place to start.
  2. I take a lot of breaks. I have reasons for some of those breaks because I like my tea and I have a particular bladder condition that means my days are filled with a lot of pee breaks. If this is TMI for you, you might not want to read my blog because I don’t have a lot of respect for the TMI rule. :D Let’s say I can learn to limit these (change is hard but not impossible). ;) Let’s say I can cut down to 25% of my time lost to breaks. Right now I swear sometimes it’s closer to 50%, but that’s because I’m terribly bad at letting myself start things during my breaks that almost always take longer than I expect. Let’s say I can stop that. So, 25% of writing time is not going to be used for writing.
  3. My overall WPH average is currently 524 words. More recently, that average has gone up to 641 words per hour. I’m going to use 641, just because I want to.
    14.25 × 75% × 641 = 6,850
    But answer #1 says I can’t use 14.25 hours. It’s just not realistic. I mean, when am I going to cook, eat, yell at my kids :D, and all the other stuff that inevitably needs to be done every day? So I did a few more calculations. Say it’s reasonable to write during only 50% of that 14.25 hours.
    7.125 × 75% × 641 = 3,425
    On the other hand, say it’s reasonable to write during 66% of that 14.25 hours, still leaving almost 5 hours for stuff besides those allowances I’ve already made.
    9.405 × 75% × 641 = 4,521
    I can cut this last one back to a very conservative 525 WPH pace, and I still come up with 3,703 words. That’s a good check figure. It falls somewhere in between my two main results and shows that even if I have a day where my pace slows down, I should still expect something that falls within the range I’ve calculated. Of course, I could keep tweaking these numbers and pretty much make them spit out any result I want. I’m not going to do that. This calculation uses reasonable assumptions and I’m sticking with it.

And there you have it. I should be expecting myself to reach at least something approaching these numbers every day that I write. Just looking at that makes me feel like a complete and total slacker, because I’m nowhere near those numbers on a regular basis.

All that said, I have no intention of using these calculations to create another schedule for myself or set a time-based writing goal. All I wanted to know was what a reasonable daily word count is for me, as a full time writer. It’s a lot more than I thought it would be.

It’s also a little bit inspiring. ;) I can do this.

Challenges for the win

I wrote “the year of the schedule is sputtering to an end” and immediately thought about my “no more zero word days” challenge and how it’s still pushing me to write something every day even when I really, really don’t want to.

Last night was absolutely painful getting the words down. I was tired after spending more than 5 hours rearranging my living room furniture. I still wasn’t happy at the end of the night. This morning I worked out the kinks and I’ve got something I can live with for a while, I think. I didn’t have anything to add to my current scene. In fact, I came close for the second (or third) time this week to deleting the last 2000 words. I do, in fact, think that’s what I’m going to do today. It’s time to admit the story is stalled because I went somewhere with it that I don’t like and that just isn’t working for me. It’s time to get rid of that and start over.

And yet, I continue to write something each day on one of my books in progress so I can keep my streak alive.

It’s definitely something to work with.

Just a quick post to reorient myself

I’ve been gone (vacation) and now I’m back, and although I didn’t get three 2k days in a row yet, I wanted to post a quick update to say I’m about to give it a shot, starting today. I’m hoping I’ll be back in 3 days and can post a better update. I have a ton of writing to do to catch up in October and I need to get started ASAP.

Also, my daily No More Zero Word Days streak is still alive. Yay! Vacation didn’t kill it, although I’m almost certain I had one day with just a bit less than 50 words, but since I was on vacation and wrote anyway, I’m counting it—even though I wouldn’t count it if I’d been home. I’m about to input all those words and update my daily word count spreadsheet and figure out just what I accomplished while I was gone.

I’m back!

Didn’t think I was going to show up again for a while, did you? Me neither! but I did it. Three consecutive days of >1,000 words.

3,189
2,740
1,116
1,075

I did those words not on one story but on five. I’ve got six novels and a short story I want to finish by the end of the year and I can do it if I start averaging closer to 3000 words a day as long as I stick to working only on those projects.

I’m nowhere near that right now, but all it’s going to take is training. Already 3000 words is starting to feel a whole lot more doable each day. It just doesn’t have that hugeness to it that it used to have.

The No More Zero Word Days restart has given me a lot of words I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Also, I’ve had two nights where I couldn’t stand to stop before I reached that 1000 word goal. Writing every day is good for me. Letting myself work on whatever has my interest at the moment also seems to be good for me.

Writing crazy long blog posts? Not so good for me.

So, I’m banning writing here until I’ve had 3 days in a row of >2,000 words. Fingers crossed I’ll be back in 3 days!

Update on “no more zero word days” restart

I restarted my “no more zero word days” challenge on Thursday and I thought I’d let you know how it’s going. In case you care. You probably don’t. But I do, so there. ;)

Thurs. 125
Fri. 60
Sat. 1,270
Sun. 631
Mon. 158

If it hadn’t been for the “no more zero word days” rule, I’m telling you now that Fri., Sun., and Mon. all would have been zero word days. This just goes to prove exactly how big the getting started barrier is for me. If I can get started, I can usually accomplish something. I mean, 631 words on Sun. and I honestly had thought I was going to be lucky to push out the 50 words I’ve decided is the bare minimum.

Today I want more. I’m still showing a lack of respect for my writing time and this post again proves it. It’s 10:30 and I should have started an hour and a half ago. I’m short of sleep. Too much reading last night.

This morning’s late start can also be blamed on reading. I’ve been reading more of Garden of Lies. Unfortunately, since I started reading that one, I’ve also read two novellas, two novella length fan fiction stories, a couple of short stories, and one novel length fan fiction story that I wrote but never quite finished. That one needs a few scenes between the late middle and ending that I did write to finish it off, but I’ve been working on it since 200x and I still don’t know if I’m ready to finish it. I’m really not sure when I started it, but it was in the early 2000s sometime and I don’t have backups that old anymore to give me a better range of dates. I made some major progress on it in 2011, and then again in 2013. In between is the time during which I quit writing all fiction for a year. The big D kept me too distracted and I had absolutely no urge to write fiction during that long year.

I’ve always thought it was fitting that I started writing again almost one year later exactly. May 2011 to May 2012. I picked the habit back up quickly, dusted off a fan fiction story I had finished the very same day I realized I was going to have to get a divorce, and I read through it and realized it was already done. Nothing to do but publish to a fan fiction archive. Then I wrote five more stories.

That was about the time I first heard about KDP so then I wrote a short story just to see if I would still enjoy writing original fiction. Then I wrote another, longer book, that became my first published book. Then I wrote and published another short story and started another novel.

Then I quit my job to write full time. That was four months later. :D

I often feel indecisive and incapable of following through, but when I’m being more objective, I can look at my life and see that there are plenty of examples that support a more nuanced view. I’m indecisive when I don’t know what I want, and I have trouble following through when I’m quietly conflicted about something, even if I haven’t realized what that conflict is yet.

My writing brings forward a lot of conflicted feelings for me. It often feels like work because writing is hard for me. Forcing myself to work when I don’t have to is also hard for me. But I love having written. I love reading my books when they’re done and I love re-reading my stories when the mood strikes, just as I did this morning with that unfinished piece of fan fiction. And I’ve written and published 12 novels and 9 shorter pieces of fiction in about 3 years. There’s follow through in that, no matter how often on this blog I make it sound like I can’t get anything done. ;)

The interesting thing is that the books are usually much better than I remember them being, so the act of re-reading them can sometimes boost my confidence and make it easier to tackle the day’s writing.

That’s how I feel today. Anyway, it’s time to end the long ramble and get started. I have books to write so I can have fun re-reading them later. :)

Started: 10:27 am
Finished: 11:50 am (Ouch! What happened to my decision to stop rereading and tweaking my—? Oh wait. I totally have an explanation for this. I started looking for the date I’d started that fan fiction story I mentioned above, ended up coming across a book in my archives I barely remembered, opened it, and read through the whole thing, all 15,000 words of it before finishing this post. It’s not funny how often that kind of thing happens to me and then I can’t even remember that I did it when I have to account for the time spent!)

A do-over for my do-over, part 3

Well, I ended up with 1,270 words and only made it to two stories. Not two additional stories after my break, but two total for the day. Not bad considering I was away for two hours that I didn’t expect to be away because of an unanticipated dinner invitation. :) I love dinner invites! So yeah. I was gone, gone, gone.

I’m not quite happy with my progress today. I’d have liked a lot more words. Still, I’ll take it over the 60 yesterday or the 125 the day before.

Also, this was day four of my “no more zero word days” revisit. So far, holding strong to the commitment!

Refocusing on my schedule

I can’t really explain why I didn’t end up writing much yesterday. I did get a few words in at the end of the day, enough to make me comfortable saying that I am restarting my “no more zero word days” challenge. From yesterday forward, no more zero word days. The more days I can string together, the greater my victory. Failure just means I have another opportunity to create an even longer string of days.

Funnily enough, after writing yesterday that it’s been five months since I started trying to follow my current schedule, I have decided that following the schedule alone is not going to be enough to keep me writing on a regular basis.

I’ve crunched some numbers and discovered that some of my best daily word count averages were stretched over times when I kept myself accountable for how much time I spent writing, not how much time I had set aside to write. It didn’t seem to matter how I held myself accountable, whether it was timed writing or simply timing my writing (counting down versus counting up), only that I was accountable for what time I did spend writing.

That probably explains why the schedule worked so well to start with but no longer seems to make a difference. In the beginning, I did treat those times much more like timed writing sessions, whereas now, I seem to treat the schedule more as time set aside during which I should be writing. I don’t even feel that guilty when I don’t write during that time! This post proves it. It’s 10:34, and I should be writing right this minute.

I’m not ready to give up the current schedule (because I really like it and I do feel that of all the schedules I’ve ever tried, it’s the one that suits me best), but there’s not a lot of room for doubt about how I should be thinking of my writing time and it’s not the way I’m currently thinking of it.

I’m going to continue to try to find ways to push myself to write during my scheduled times, using whatever tricks are necessary. I meant it when I said this was the year of the schedule. The year isn’t over yet and I’m sticking it out.

Here’s a short quote from what I wrote in that post. It’s why I’m not giving up on the schedule, even after five months of mostly failure. I did take a quick look and I was wrong about the three weeks of success. It was closer to six. Six weeks of success out of five months isn’t that bad.

So here’s the challenge. I’m going to make a schedule. Every day will be a challenge to stick to it. I’ll probably fail more often than I succeed. Maybe if I’m lucky some good habits will develop around the times I’m supposed to be writing that will make it work over the long-term even if I have a lot of short-term failures. If not, well, how’s it any worse than what I’ve already got going on?

No more searching for the best system, no more word count quotas or goal-setting, no more excuses. It’s time to move on from all that and settle in. The remainder of 2015 is going to be the year of the schedule.

As for today, I’m still thrilling over how fun writing was on Wednesday when I was working through my list of stories, trying to write 50 words on each one and then moving on, so even though I had trouble getting started yesterday, I don’t think I’m going to have trouble getting started today because it’s not the writing that’s the issue. It’s my lack of respect for my writing time. Which I’m about to fix right this minute.

First step in practicing writing faster is going to have me keeping up with how much time I spend writing these blogs posts.

Started: 10:07 am
Finished: 10:55 am

Word count has become my biggest obstacle

My daily word count has become my biggest obstacle over the last few years. I’m not sure exactly when it started to overtake every other writing concern I have, but it has and I’m not feeling great about that. I know my daily word counts are important. They’re intricately tied to success as measured by revenue because you can’t sell what isn’t written.

However, I’m also feeling a bit like the excessive focus on word count has had some side effects that I’m not really happy with, the biggest and scariest of which is a diminishing enjoyment of writing.

I know I need something to keep me going in the right direction, but … some days this need to measure everything just gets old. I want to love writing so much that I can’t wait to get started and hate to have to stop. Some days I still feel like this. Less so lately though. It’s hard for me to love writing when I’m constantly disappointed in myself because of writing.

Still, although I’ve axed my timer and my time data (archived it, to be exact), I won’t be abandoning my daily log of my word count. I love having that list of numbers. What I don’t love is looking at it and feeling bad about myself when there’s a blip where the numbers drop or a zero shows up.

On the other hand, I do love a good writing streak. For the moment, I’m going to focus on writing every day (that getting started thing is really important) and worry less about the actual quota. I want to end up with a nice average, but “average” means I don’t have to be so hard on myself for any particular day’s word count if I have a reasonable mix of bad days and good days.

What I’m learning: Consistency is important, but it’s probably better if I’m not rigid about it. I want to write every day, but some days are going to be more fun than others and it’s going to be easier to stay at it longer. We’ll see where that gets me in April.

32 day streak

I’m now at 32 days of writing fiction every day. Unlike with previous streaks, this one has no quotas, time or words. My plan is simply to see how many consecutive days I can make it writing fiction every day.

Really and truly, getting started is the hardest part for me. When I do get started, I usually do better than I expect. Like last night. I thought I’d get nothing, but then I decided I wanted to keep my streak alive, want, in fact, to create the best streak I’ve ever had, so I started writing. 439 really decent words later I stopped and went to bed because time had gotten away from me. (A really good thing when it comes to writing.)

I’ve said before, if I eliminate all the zero word days I’ve had in the past and replace them with as little as 50 words, I could have written 15,000 words more than I have since I started writing to publish. If that number had averaged 200 words, that’s an entire extra novel.

Averages are powerful things and I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine I could average 200 words a day for all those days that might be zero word days otherwise.

My ultimate goal is still to reach and maintain a 2,000 word a day average, but these small steps are helping me get there. After a really bad streak of low productivity that lasted more than a year, I’m happy to see improvement.

1,114 words today

I had hoped for more but I’m too tired! I keep yawning and I’m ready to crash. So, 1,114 words it is. But … yay! The zero word days streak has been broken. And even though 1,114 words isn’t the 2,000 I’d like, I’m not unhappy with what I have.

I’m optimistic about the chances of this new plan working out for at least a while—maybe even long-term, but it’s much too soon to start talking like that. ;) But! I feel like I might have hit on something with this one. :D

Writing Without a Plan Today

I’m writing without a plan today. Well, mostly, because saying I’m writing without a plan is sort of a plan in itself. :D

My only goal is to enjoy a leisurely day of writing, to have fun with it and see where my stories take me. I’ll be using the timer when I write, because I’m still tracking my WPH for … whatever reason. I like it. I’ve deleted it from my spreadsheet several times, but each time, I ended up pulling the data off my backups and adding it back. This time it’s here to stay. I’m not deleting it again.

Anyway, I’m going to start writing here in a few minutes, probably after I finish my Lipton Orange Jasmine tea, and—

Okay, it’s now about an hour later, and I can tell you how that went… I looked up the actual title of the tea I drink (Lipton Orange Passionfruit Jasmine Green Tea), then decided I wanted to see the nutrition info and found out a cup has 35mg of caffeine in it. (My other favorite flavors have 22mg and 20mg so I might drink more of them going forward and less of the orange jasmine.) That led me to look up info on caffeine so I would know if 35mg was a lot or a little and that led me to click the bookmark for my pen name’s author site, which I then decided to update with a post about my upcoming book, which I then decided to also write something about the book I’m thinking about writing and I decided to post an excerpt for it for a show of interest…

And now I’m back. I actually caught this diversion of attention a little early! So, yay me! I did lose some time, but … getting that update on my author site isn’t really a waste of time so much as it was bad timing. I could’ve done that when I was tired and uninterested in writing.

But what’s done is done, so moving on!

I just clicked the “Strict Workflow” button on Chrome (which blocks a lot of tempting sites I added to the block list), and now I’m going to finish this post, get a new cup of tea, and start writing.

I discovered an interesting thing when I was updating my author site. I have no objectivity with my writing. When I wrote those pages, I thought they were awesome. A week or two later, I read back through them and though they were utterly stupid and that I would have to abandon the idea. Today, I read through them (it’s been about a month since I wrote them), and I loved them again.

:o

Now, off for tea and writing. :)

Update (4 days later)—

All I know is that I have a big fat zero on my daily word count log for this day.

Ouch.

New Day, New Routine

Really it’s just an old routine, slightly modified. Write 1,667 words from 7 til 10 but keep going if I haven’t quite made it to my word count goal.

It’s almost winter, so getting up earlier is easier as long as I get to bed at a reasonable time and I started doing that two days ago. I woke up on my own at 6 a.m. this morning and I feel better than I did yesterday. I stopped the coffee again, because after two weeks of caffeine, I can say with certainty that it’s making no difference in how much I write: the first week on coffee again I wrote 10,251 words and the second week I wrote 21. Not a typo.

It’s 6:51 right now and I’m finishing breakfast quickly and making an effort to get back to a 7 a.m. start time. I usually have more energy first thing and then by 8 or 9 I’m sleepy again. If I’m already writing and into my stories, I can push that back. If I’m not, then I end up not writing until the afternoon usually, and then it becomes a struggle to get started at all. Such as with yesterday, when I wrote nothing but a blog post.

Today’s goals are simple. Finish 1,667 words before 10 a.m. if possible, definitely before lunch. Then write 1,333 words before bed. Also, work one hour on my paperback formatting. Now, it is 7 a.m. and it’s time to get to work.

Update (8:33 a.m.)—

I set up my timer with 3 hours on it. I’ve had to take 3 quick breaks so far (tea, phone, phone—school’s letting out early because of sewer problems, ack) so I’m sitting at 2 hours and 42 seconds left on my timer and that means I’m about half an hour behind. My word count at the half hour mark was a negative because I deleted some stuff, and now it’s at 57 words. But I feel like I’m gaining some momentum finally so maybe my next update will be a lot better. :)

Update (9:37 a.m.)—

I deleted more, meaning I ended up into negative numbers again, but now I’m almost caught back up. I don’t have anything else ahead of me that I can delete (there’s nothing but a blank page waiting for me!) so I’ll be moving forward from this point on. My timer’s sitting at 1 hour and 29 minutes but I forgot to restart it for almost half an hour after my 8:33 a.m. update so technically I’m not really behind this time other than the half hour I was already behind.) Still, since I was too busy deleting stuff instead of adding, I think I’m just going to go with the timer. No way I’m going to get caught up to 1,667 words in only one hour, but maybe, possibly, I can do it in the 1 hour and 29 minutes now that the sludge is cleared away and it’s all fresh writing ahead. We’ll see.

Update (10:59 a.m.)—

I’m down to 18 minutes on the timer and I’m up to 487 words. I’m also just about certain I just wrote a bunch of stuff that doesn’t need to be in this book but I think I’m just going to go with it for now. I’ve been working on that novella this morning and I’m just glad to be making progress. :) But now, I need another break before I finish those last 18 minutes. Be back soon.

Update (12:29 p.m.)—

I’m pleased with my progress. I didn’t make it anywhere close to 1,667 words but the novella’s story is moving along. I ended up with 3.75 hours and 591 words. And this is a great example of what I mean when I say I feel like I spend the entire morning working, focused and on task, and still end up with significantly less time writing than time spent.

I wrote from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. That’s 5.5 hours. And yet I wrote to a timer, logging 3 hours plus the time where I forgot to run the timer for about 30 minutes and then kept writing after the timer stopped for about 15 more. The difference between that 5.5 and 3.75 hours is 1 hour and 45 minutes of time lost to breaks that I can’t account for. My breaks felt significantly shorter than that, and sometimes I wonder if my ability to feel the passage of time is impaired.

Anyway, I’ll be back later today to work on those 1,333 words I’m hoping to get this afternoon (on the novel I started this month unless I have a great idea for the novella in the meantime).

Update (3:25 p.m.)—

This post has gotten very long and it’s about to get longer. I’m starting my afternoon session at 3:30 p.m. and the goal is to write 1,333 words before 6 p.m. if possible, but definitely before bedtime. Such as with this morning, I’m mostly going to stick to the 2.5 hours I have planned and hope that does it. If not I’ll try to go longer, but I don’t plan to go past 8:30 p.m. which is when I’m going to do that one hour of work on my paperback formatting.

Oh, and I watched an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which has shown up on Netflix. What a great show so far. I’m ready for episode #3 now. Quite a fun bunch of characters!

Time to get to it.

Update (5:07 p.m.)—

And I’ve had a few interruptions but nothing too time consuming. I’m at 1 hour and 25 minutes on the timer and 502 words, so I’ve been writing for just about an hour. I wish I weren’t behind at all, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes…

Update (6:29 p.m.)—

I’m not quite done. My timer is at 33 minutes left and that means I’m about an hour behind. I’ve had a lot of interruptions this last hour and a half, although an hour feels excessive when I try to recall them. The problem is that whether I can recall them or not, the time is the time and the timer doesn’t lie. At least not when I’ve remembered to start and stop it appropriately, which I’ve done. I’ve written for about 2 hours and I’m up to 815 words, with my total for the day coming in at 1,406.

I’m going to try to get to 1,667 for the day, since that’s the average I want to hit and hope that after a few days the writing will get easier so I can keep it up and maybe even make up some of the zero days since I started aiming at the 1,667 words a day average.

I just don’t understand why writing is so hard sometimes.

Update (9:37 p.m.)—

I just realized I’ve spent 3 hours watching YouTube videos. I’ve done this before, but rarely—like 5,000 words in a day rare. I have no idea why today had to be that day but I have just binge watched 3 hours of talent show clips. What. The. Hell. And now it’s past my bedtime and I haven’t even had supper yet. I cannot believe that was three hours. Seriously. Cannot believe it.

Wow. I guess I’m calling it a night at 1,406 words. I’m a little disappointed in myself but I can’t for the life of me figure out how I can stop this from happening again because I don’t know how it happened in the first place.(!!!!)

Day 13 of NANO 2014

My day today is one big blob of time. I shouldn’t have any interruptions so I am hopeful I’ll reach 3,000 words. In case you’re wondering, this isn’t me having rethought the things I rethought a week or so ago. This is me trying to play a bit of catch up because I’m behind in my word counts for nanowrimo. :) I’d like to win this year but I can’t do that with the daily 1,667 word goal I talked about in that post.

None of that withstanding, I’m still working hard to increase my daily word count average, because as I mentioned, it’s not where it needs to be. Since that post on November 5, my daily average has dropped to 687 words a day, because I had several more zero word days that dragged it down including a day where I ended with −2,312 words and the few good days since haven’t brought it back up yet. I’m working on it. :)

My plan to write 3,000 words today

2 hours (goal: 1,000 words) – Reached 859 words and 2 hours on my nano story; I’m really not sure why I’m writing so slow these days but even though it’s coming slowly, the story is moving along. Of course, I go from first draft to final draft as I write, cycling through, so I try not to agonize too much over my speed. When I’m done, I’m done, and that’s the way I like to write. :D

2 hours (goal: 1,000 words) – Reached 380 words and 2 hours (still working the nano story); holy crap I have no idea why this is going so slow. This is like molasses speed or something. I didn’t delete; I didn’t rewrite. I wove parts of the story together, adding continuity and finessing my way forward because … I don’t know. But yeah, even I admit that this pace is ridiculous. If I didn’t have that timer to prove how long I’d worked, I wouldn’t believe it myself.

2 hours (goal: 1,000 words) – Reached 651 words and 1.183 hours (nano story)

I didn’t reach 3,000 words. Not even 2,000 actually. But I’ll try again tomorrow because I’m not ready to give up on winning nanowrimo yet.

Today’s Goals and the End of No More Zero Word Days

Well, I looked at the 50 word minimum on my 123rd day of writing every day and I quit. I have no idea why, still, but it was a conscious decision. I stared at the page, knowing I would be writing the 50 words just to keep the streak alive and I very deliberately closed my document and set my computer aside and went to bed. That was a couple of days ago.

If you want me to explain why I did that, you’ll have to ask me another day because I don’t know the answer.

Yesterday, I proofed and began formatting a book I’m preparing to publish and I didn’t write. So now I have a two day 0 word streak that I plan to end today after I finish my formatting. My biggest challenge will be staying focused enough on the formatting not to get sucked into doing related but less important tasks. I’ve already slipped off track this morning and reformatted an older story (the book I’m preparing is a bundle of the short stories I’ve written over the last few years) that needed updating (two typos, back matter updates, etc).

Now, I’m off to heat up my tea and get back to formatting the new one. I’m trying to finish by 9:30 am.

Today’s goals

I’d like to write about 3,000 words and publish that book I’m formatting by 6 pm.

Today’s progress

Well, it’s 11:24 am and I just finished that formatting. I got my EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and Smashwords DOC all fixed up, and they do look fabulous if I do say so myself. :D I use Word and Jutoh, and to be honest it was the PDF that took all my time.

I forget how finicky Word gets when you start adding in headers and footers and set the layout options to different first page and different odd and even pages. That doesn’t work well when you don’t want extra pages added into the PDF (something that’s all right when you’re doing paperback formatting but when the PDF is for general downloading, not so much). It really makes those headers and footers tricky business! But as a struggling perfectionist, I can’t seem to help the compulsion I have to get those headers just right.

I’ll be working on paperback formatting for this book and three others the rest of the week and I can tell you now, I’ve heard a lot of self-publishers talk about how they can generate their paperbacks in an hour or two, and I can only guess that they don’t bother with hyphenation, widows and orphans, fancifying, or much else or they’ve done some fantastic systemization of their process because that stuff takes some serious time.

I usually spend about 15 to 20 hours on a book to get it print ready, although I’m thinking of taking a page out of some of these other authors’ playbooks and limiting what I do. I don’t make enough on paperback sales compared to ebook sales to put as much work into the formatting as I do. I go line by line looking for hyphenation and widows and orphans issues and let me say, that takes what feels like forever.

If you have tips for how to format for print efficiently, I’m all ears. Seriously.

Well, back to work. Time to do some writing before I start publishing later. 3,000 words is probably not going to be possible today by 6 pm since I’ll have to stop around 3 pm to start publishing but I’ll take whatever I can get! :)

HA HA HA HA!

As soon as it came time to write, I remembered a very important thing I needed to do today—shop for a replacement health insurance plan, because my current plan is ending at the end of the month. So there went my afternoon. I’m pretty sure the dude who was answering my questions about the healthcare marketplace hung up on me. :D In the end, though, I didn’t need his help and I found what I was looking for. I admit it took me from 11:30 am to 3:30 pm to narrow it down to 9 policy options and then choose one. But I feel good about my choice. Only now I have the issue that the healthcare.gov website went down (likely because open enrollment starts soon and they’re doing site improvements—that’d be my guess from the error message) and I either have to try to “confirm” my choice again tomorrow or call them. I really wish it was done but hey, at least I didn’t wait until the last day!

I’m going to fit in one hour of writing here shortly but that’ll probably be it for tonight. I’m actually kind of pooped right now. :)

Tomorrow, my plan is to start writing early-ish, but I’ll still probably go ahead and publish that book first since I meant to do that today. I estimate an hour and a half for the publishing. When I can get going in the mornings, I really do perform better and stay focused longer.

Somehow I think I need to figure out how to do that every day.

The accountability page

I took this from the accountability page, because I want this recorded for my own benefit but that page is about to go through an overhaul.

Yesterday (October 3, 2014) was day 107 of writing every day. I knew I was close to the 100 day mark, but I didn’t know I’d already gone a week past it. Yay! :D

Now, to be completely honest, on 33 of those days I wrote less than 100 words (I have a 50 word minimum) and I only wrote more than 2,000 words on 19 of those days.

My average for those 107 days is 824 words (and includes several negative word count days where I deleted way more than I wrote). But my all time daily average is 712 words (and would technically be less than that if I didn’t include the 107 days that averaged higher than 712 words). What that means is that this “no more zero word days” plan is actually helping my daily average! Not nearly as much as I want, but any gain is better than stagnation!

A 112 word increase sounds minuscule, until you multiply it by 365 days. Then you get 40,880 words—a decent sized novella or a short novel! I don’t know about you, but that’s worth something to me. :)

 

Going to Back off on the Planning Posts

Well, blogging the writing stuff is helpful sometimes, and other times, it’s just boring. :D

I think I’m going to back off on the planning posts and no more zero word days posts for a while. I will definitely still update my yearly word count on my progress page and I might even do weekly word count updates or something—not sure yet about that.

It’s not that the planning posts take that long, maybe 15 to 30 minutes tops to put together and another 10 or so for the updates each time (that’s accounting for opening the browser, loading the page, checking for errors and fixing typos I notice too, but it does take some time to do those things.

And it’s not that the no more zero word days posts are a bother either. I just don’t see the point, tbh. We all know I’m the only one reading these posts, and writing them has gotten kind of boring lately. :D

Day 47–51 of No More Zero Word Days

Day 47: 3,055
Day 48: 2,610
Day 49: 2,692
Day 50: 95
Day 51: 766

I’m at 51 consecutive days of writing at least 50 words of fiction. As you can see, my numbers have finally definitely started trending upward, so I’m calling this experiment a complete success. 51 days. Boggles my mind. :) I can’t wait to see how long I can keep this going.

That said, I was more right about yesterday than I expected. I got almost nothing written. I barely crossed my minimum, coming in at 95 words for the day after I sat down at 11 PM and did my best to get something done. I had told myself I would start writing once I got home but that didn’t come to pass. Instead, I watched the entire season 2 of Hemlock Grove. I have no idea why. :o

Today’s been tough going, especially considering what I set as my goal. I’ve already spent 3 hours writing with nothing to show for it. I haven’t really got going yet so I hope I can pull out a miracle and end the night strong. I’ll update today’s number when I’m done. (It’s final now.)

I made a change to my workspace that I hope is going to help with tonight’s numbers, and it’s time to get to it.

Day 46 of No More Zero Word Days

On Day 46 I wrote 765 words and I was lucky to get those. Not because there wasn’t time (there was) but because I am in the throes of self-doubt, hypercritical self-assessment, and a general “all my books suck” frame of mind.

I also have no idea where any of my stories are going at the moment and my usual method of just going with it isn’t working. I just keeping going with it right over a cliff and I’ve deleted more in the last couple of months than I’ve deleted in the last two years prior to that put together.

Yeah. Writing is so fun right now.*

At least I’m doing some writing these days. I’ve written 30,945 words that I haven’t deleted since day 1 of my streak. Silver linings and all that. :D

*Lots of sarcasm! I apologize profusely but this is how it all came out, comma shortage and all…