Day: August 4, 2014

Today’s Plan (Success!)

Lynn

I’m working on two novels at the moment. Both need to be finished ASAP. One needs 20–25k more words and the other needs 25–30k. If I can follow my plan, I should finish the second one within a week of the first.

I need both of these books completed this month, and preferably not both of them on August 31 either. :o

If I can stick to my plan from this day forward, I can finish the first by the 20th and that’s later than I want but acceptable.

So, the plan is to stick to the plan! :D

Today’s goal is 2,900 words in 4 hours. That’s 725 words in each one hour session, with a goal of doing ten 5 minute sprints where I maintain an average of 73 words per session (or 15 wpm). It’s the second guessing and deleting that kills my speed every time, so I’m going to try to limit that today.

9:20–10:20 (stopped at 10:20, finished 7 sessions, reached 619 words) (seemed to be off to a slow start, lots of second guessing and tweaking as I went!)
10:30–11:30 (stopped at 11:38, finished 3 sessions, forgot to reset, reached 659 words) (got busy tweaking and ended up writing without the timer by mistake—not sure how that happened, tbh)
12:00–1:00 (finished at 1:04, did 9 sessions, reached 900 words even, yay!)
2:30–3:30 (finished at 3:42, did 8 sessions, reached 861 words)

Success! I’ve reached 3,055 words.

Then if the writing is going well and I feel like continuing, I’ll aim for 5,000 in 3 more sessions.

3:40–4:40
4:50–5:50
8:20–9:20

I’ve decided I’m not ready to commit to going for 5,000 today so I’m going ahead and taking the three extra hours off my schedule. I still might do another hour or maybe even two, but I’m going to break for now. :D

It’s time to get tea and settle in and try, try, try to get my creative juices flowing, so I’m going to wrap this planning session up here.

I made some adjustments to my start times for the later sessions.

Read Another Book—11 of 60

Lynn

I finished Paladins of Shannara: Allanon’s Quest by Terry Brooks last week. I almost forgot to add it to my list. :) It’s another short story, but as I said before, I’m counting them for my reading challenge.

Allanon's Quest - Paladins of Shannara - Terry Brooks

It’s been hard to get into a novel these last few weeks because I have so much writing I need to do and I don’t want to get invested. I used to think I read fast, but I’ve had to face the fact that I actually don’t. I just used to spend so much of my time reading! There’s a difference there that’s hard to ignore when you don’t have so much time to spend. It takes me anywhere from 4 to 8 hours to read a book, depending on complexity and how into the story I get. As my interest peaks, I actually think I read slower.

It’s been about 25 years since I read The Sword of Shannara and its sequels, and I’ve been meaning to catch up with the series and finish it off but I’ve just never done it.

My first and favorite Terry Brooks book is Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold!. I have it and several of the sequels on my shelf just to my left and I reread the first few chapters of the book just a month or so ago. I love that book! :D

Oh, and this short story was good. Read it if you like short fantasy fiction.