So I’ve been writing this for a little over a month, including various notes scribbled in notebooks, plot points scoped out in MS Excel, and the Scrivener project I wrote on the trial for twenty-something days before coughing up for the full version. This week, my aim was to keep it ticking over, but take a few more breaks so I didn’t completely wear myself out by pushing when I didn’t feel like it – I have several (60) thousand words more to go on this Zero Draft, and it would suck to not finish because I burned myself out on it.
Vital statistics
- Draft Zero/Fast Draft (I thought I should make this clear. It’s gonna need some hectic rewriting when I finally get to the end).
- Word count: 22 839 (approx. 27%)
- Words this week: 4854
- Best day: Friday (1590)
I’ve basically noticed this week that I wrote more most days I wrote, even though I wrote with less reliable frequency.
Challenges
I feel like a wimp for saying this, but for several days of this past week, I’ve simply felt too hot to write. After sitting at my desk for 8 hours for work, the last thing I felt like was carrying on, or worse, sitting between my laptop and its heat-generation and the leather couch that I melted into. The heat made me tired, cranky and unproductive. On the plus side though, I learned how to be a bit more gentle with myself.
I’ve also started to tire of writing a blog a day, as this saps some energy (and therefore words) from the bigger, more significant project. I don’t really know what a good number would be to stop doing the daily post. Part of me is tempted to keep going til I hit 100, but that’s almost a month off, so another part of me is saying that I should can it at a different milestone. I’ll keep ticking ’em over so long, but I’m on a blog-publishing streak of 70, and a lightning blog streak of 55.
Sort of kind of hit/missed my goal for the week, of taking 2-3 days off… I feel like I took more slack time than writing time, even if, when I look at the days and word counts, I did okay, and did only take 3 days off.
Wins
Big wins for the week include that I’ve finally got to the murder, and it’s taken a while, but I’m glad I’m here. Now I can go about figuring out the finer details. This also marks the last bit that I had substantially planned (more than just a bare two line sketch in the scene file on Scrivener). That means that this week will likely be a lot of planning in bullet points for the next 25% of the novel so I can write with direction.
The other big win for the week (my Freudian typo there was ‘win for the weak’) was that I’, over 25% of the planned word count through. I think that’s a pretty respectable milestone. I’ve now passed my most recent master’s thesis in length, and I’m not far off my first master’s thesis.
Goals for next week
An honest goal for the week would be to sketch out Act 2 of the novel in more depth, ideally reaching at least the same word count as I did this week.
I’m also starting Writers’ HQ’s course, Plotstormers with Friends, in which I hope to plan out my SciFi idea I’ve had, so I may split my writing time. My other goal with this course is to make some writer buddies. 🙂
Everyday Adventures 