Project Songbird: a start

Over the course of the last nearly two months, I have scratched out a little over 25 000 words of blog. It has been immensely satisfying to keep writing daily, and to maintain my unbroken streak as yet. At some point, I’m going to have to symbolically end my streak.

Obviously.

Today I’m starting a different series, one in which I commit to posting updates about my other writing, particularly the novel project I have on the go at the moment. I’m trying to hack out a Draft Zero, and still experimenting with Scrivener. One feature I quite like is that you can set session goals (for word count) and project goals. So I have aimed to write 600 words per ‘session’, whatever that is, and I’m aiming for 85 000 words for the project (apparently this is standard-ish novel length).

I’ve got another project that came to me the other day that I also need to do the layout in Scrivener and stuff, but I’m going to try to stick to one until I get at least 10% into it. Currently sitting at about 2%.

My aim is to post once per week on Project Songbird, and update you on my word count and possibly share some of the difficulties I’ve encountered, and hopefully some of the challenges my characters have thrown my way. I would far prefer my characters being difficult or providing the challenges, because if it’s my difficulties, it is likely to be ‘sat down to write, opened Scrivener, wabbed online for a bit, went to scrub the shower instead.’ I heard a brilliant thing on the writing excuses podcast that was something along the lines of ‘Whatever problems you can solve in the rest of life, [like laundry or life admin] are going to be easier to solve than the problems of actually doing the writing.’

Project Songbird status update:

• Draft Zero
• Genre: murder mystery (with some time travel).
• Rough outline plotted in Scrivener
• Several characters sketched in light detail, but I don’t know enough about them
• Word count: 2244 (2.3%).
• Weekly aim: I want to write another 3000 words by Sunday evening, when I will do another update, then will try to make it a weekly thing on Sundays.

Honestly, I wrote this because I didn’t feel like writing another song blog today. It’s been a weird day for feelings, with some past work-related anxieties rearing its head, and feeling a bit homesick and stuff. Looking forward to seeing some family tomorrow, when they pause for supper on their way up to the Lake District for a holiday.

So, away from the blog, and back to Project Songbird!