Good month, bad day

I’ve reached one new record this month: April 2016 has now become the month in which I’ve written the most words since I started tracking. Fiction words, of course, because if I counted these blogs posts and other stuff, who knows what it’d be? Just know that when I talk about records, I’m always talking about fiction I plan to publish.

I’ve written 55,810 words this month. Then there’s today.

It’s unlikely I’ll reach my 3,933 word count goal for today, but I have written a few more words that I’ll add to that number, and I might write a few more on top of that. We’ll see. More below on that topic.

I feel like I’ve slowed down these last few days, but I think it’s because I’ve been so tired from lack of adequate sleep. I want to write more, but I just don’t have a lot of energy for it.

I’ve already made a pact with myself to get into bed early tonight. I really have to stop staying up late for stupid reasons!

Unfortunately, that resolution doesn’t help the fact that I’m dog tired today, and it’s 3:52 and all I’ve written so far is 302 words. I didn’t use the timer for those words either, so I have no notion what my writing speed is—I think it’s slow. Like, really slow.

The big problem seems to be my natural affinity for morning light. It’s getting light outside very early in the mornings here, a little before 5:30 am. I’m just not getting to bed in time to get a good night’s sleep considering how difficult it is for me to sleep after daylight comes. I’ve been waking up around 5–5:30 am and not getting back to sleep. That’d be fine if I was going to sleep before 11:30–12:00, but I’m not. I don’t believe I’ve gone to sleep before 11:30 once this past week, and it’s been much closer to midnight many of those nights.

I need more sleep.

If I don’t make myself get it, I’m going to stall out again on the writing. I can tell. Today proves it. I feel the desire to write, but I can’t even keep my eyes focused on the screen as I’m trying to write. (I sometimes get headaches if I don’t get enough sleep and today is one of those times. My eyes don’t focus well when I have a headache and I don’t work through headaches well.)

Anyway, all that to say today kind of sucks for writing.

But—I want to keep trying. I’m about to start an actual session on one of my books. Maybe knowing the timer is going will help.

I could be reading the book I finished yesterday, searching for mistakes, but yeah… I’m sure that’d go great with this headache. I’ll save that for tomorrow.

By the way, lack of sleep really can feel like inebriation. I have that same floaty head feeling and it’s dogged me all day. And there’s one reason why I don’t drink alcohol very often. I hate that feeling.

Let’s try this again

Today is not a good day for breaking my record, but I think I’m going to try again anyway. Here’s the deal: I have things to do today that mean I’ll be away for at least 4 hours, probably more than 5.

But to break my record, if I can maintain my current speeds (average of about 835 words an hour, or 922 if I only count this last week’s work*), I can write 6,000 words in about 7 hours of writing. I think I can keep those speeds up with the way the writing’s been going.

So here’s the plan: write for 3 hours before lunch, take a short lunch, and write 3 more hours before I have to stop. Then, if I’m close, I think I can find the motivation to write for 1 more hour before I call it a night, and I’ll sleep in tomorrow morning.

Then, of course, do it all over again. :D (I wish. But why not dream big?)

So here goes. I have to get started, because it’s already 8:40 and I’m terribly bad at losing time to breaks. Lunch will be here before I’m ready, guaranteed!

Hour 1: 1,067 words
Hour 2: 1,392 words | 2,459 cumulative 1
Hour 3: 756 words | 3,215 cumulative 2

1 Whoa! Also, I’m less than one session away from finishing that troublesome novel I’ve mentioned in several previous posts. Yay!

2 I totally screwed up by not finishing 3 sessions before lunch, and then watching tv during lunch. It was not a short lunch. :o Hour 3 dragged on and on, but I finished one of my novels! I’m not sure about the last couple of lines, but I think it’s going to work. Either way, I’m saying it’s done. I’ve sent it to my Kindle for a read through later. :D

Final count: 3,228. I added a few words but I’m definitely not going to be able to write for another hour because it’s much later than I expected it would be. So that’s it for today.

*Why am I writing so much faster than my previous speeds? I credit the high level of interest I’m maintaining in my work by switching freely between projects. It’s been a magic pill, really it has. Also, I don’t know. Something might have changed in me.

Multiple stories at once: third week

Thursday—Wednesday, April 21–27

245 (4 stories) (was not a writing day, just inputting error corrections after a read through)
2,245 (1 story)
2,863 (1 story)
149 (3 stories)
2,831 (2 stories)
4,858 (1 story)
3,736 (2 stories)

Total: 16,927 words.

It was a good week—really good, in all honesty, but I didn’t really come close to my goal of 27,533 for a full week of writing.

Still, I cannot deny that something has changed. I’m giving all credit to the things I mentioned in two posts I’ve written since I started this latest experiment (key to success, multiple stories first week).

I worked on 5 distinct stories this week.

Having another go at the record today

Yes, I’m having another go at the record today, after an unfortunately bad night of sleep again, so no promises that I won’t make it half the day and conk out.

But, for the moment, I feel like I could do this today. 6,000 words is the number I’m taking aim at, although I only have to get past 5,758 to break my current one-day record. In the vein of “more words, less time,” I’m hoping to do it in 7 hours or less. See ya when I have some numbers to report.

Update: TOTAL BUST. Okay, not a total bust. But I’ve been so, so tired today. I’ve spent one hour writing, and I’m hoping to get another two before I stop for the night, but there’s no chance I’ll break any records today, except (maybe) my monthly best record.

Final numbers.

Hours Words Session WPH
1 858 858 858
1 1725 867 867
0.5 2260 535 1070

Trying again to break my record

Yesterday I failed to break my one-day word count record. Since today is another day like yesterday, where there’s no real reason why I shouldn’t be able to devote most of my day to writing, I’m trying again.

Bonus? I’m only 6,253 words away from April becoming my highest word count month since I started in 2012.

Session logs:

Hours Words Session WPH
1 944 944 944
1 1966 1022 1022
1 3004 1038 1038
1 3736 732 732

I didn’t make it again today, mostly because I just felt bad. I had a headache off and on all day, and I’m frankly amazed that I wrote as many words as I did!

And now I’m only 2,516 words shy of my current record for my best month.

This “writing only what I’m interested in writing” thing is starting to look like the best method I’ve ever come up with.

I think I might try to break my one-day record again tomorrow. The only thing I can see stopping me is another headache, but I’ll wait to commit to the idea of the challenge until tomorrow. Good night!

Major push today for record

I’m going to use my 1 hour sessions and cycle through my stories in progress today to try to beat my one-day word count record and break through the 6,000 word ceiling I seem to have.

I might fail, but today seems to be a good day for trying, so I’m going to. :)

I’m about to start hour #1 and I’ll be working on Story Gf. It’s the one I’ve been most interested in the last couple of days and I think it’ll get me warmed up for the rest.

Even if it’s going really well, I think I’m going to make myself switch to Story O for hour 2. That’s the one I’m supposed to finish as quickly as I can. I really haven’t been devoting the amount of time to it as I need if I want to finish it as soon as I’d like, but it is what it is. I like the book, but it’s just not as interesting to me at the moment as Story Gf.

I’d like to avoid getting sucked into working on just one book for the moment. And although Gf is really attractive to me right now, I’m afraid I’ll slip back into bad habits if I stay on one book for all my sessions for too many days in a row, even if I’m driven to it by interest the first few days. I’m hoping to spread out my interest today and make a little progress on all my stories. :)

Finally, I am hoping to perk up my interest in Story O, and if that does happen, I’m going to try to slip in an extra hour or two for it between my other sessions.

So we’ll see how today goes. I’d like to write for 7–8 hours today and that’s asking a lot from myself! So I’d better get to work. :)

Hour 1: 929 words
Hour 2: 972 words | 1,901 cumulative 1
Hour 3: 967 words | 2,868 cumulative
Hour 4: 1,096 words | 3,964 cumulative
Hour 5: 894 words | 4,858 cumulative 2

1 Things are going slow. By this time, I’d hoped to be starting my 5th session, instead I’m about to start my 3rd. 6 more hours of writing tonight doesn’t seem likely. I’m not giving up yet though. :) If I can keep up my high wph, I could break through 6,000 with as few as 6 sessions (meaning only 4 more hours). If I can increase it, I could be done in as few as 3 more sessions. That’s asking a lot from myself, but it’s definitely something to aim for!

2 Well, I didn’t make it as far as I’d hoped today. I’m happy with what I got, of course, but I just ran out of steam earlier in the day and took too long to get back to writing, so I ran out of time. It’s bedtime, so maybe I’ll try this again tomorrow. Also, I’m a little disappointed that I ended up writing all those words on one book! And not the book I needed to write them for. So, bummer. But yay, too. Because 4,858 is a lot of words and I just can’t believe how it’s starting to feel normal for me to reach these kinds of numbers.

Gathering speed, but not there yet

Yesterday I wrote 2,863 words, in 3 hours. My goal was 5 hours and 3,933 words, but I didn’t make it. I started much too late yesterday and never really recovered.

I’m hoping to do much better today! Unfortunately, I spent a bit of time this morning adding some corrections to 3 stories, found when I read through my current works on my Kindle last night and this morning. (I send to Kindle my Word docs each night when I’m working for that very reason, and highlighting mistakes works great to keep me from getting heavy handed with changes.)

I added 149 words this morning so that’s where I’m starting. I had wanted to get in 3 hours before lunch, but now it’s looking like I’ll be good to get in 2. Anyway, getting started now. Not sure which story I want to work on first, but I’ll figure it out!

Update: I never really could get going on anything, and I don’t know why exactly—I was tired, feeling fuzzy headed, blah blah—so I took a break to watch an episode of Telenovela (which I’m hoping doesn’t get canceled but I’m not holding out much hope) and ended up binge watching the entire season 2 of How to Get Away With Murder. That’s a lot of television. :o I certainly don’t plan to do that again. But no, I didn’t end up doing any more writing yesterday at all.

Multiple stories at once: second week

Another week has gone by—already—and I have another week of data to support my growing belief that writing on multiple stories in the particular way I’m doing it now is the best thing I’ve done for my writing in a long while.

Thursday—Wednesday, April 14–20
4,185 (3 stories)
4,798 (3 stories)
1,752 (3 stories)
242 (2 stories)
0
(18)
0

Total: 10,959 words

Despite my five days off writing, I’ve still managed to make this a great week, relatively speaking. Two of those days will end up affecting the next week’s numbers, but I have to say, I’m really pleased with what I accomplished this week. I wrote 10,959 words, and that’s a good number for me based on my historical performance.

As long as I let myself write what I want, I still feel the excitement to get going. I had a moment today where I slipped and was making myself write something, and I finally noticed how it was affecting me. I felt a great deal of resistance. But once I realized what was going on, I opened a different book, read a bit of it, and then ended up writing on the one that had been bothering me at the outset anyway, just because I wanted to.

That’s where the real power of this method has shown itself.

Get rid of the need, and I’m left with want. And want is powerful.

Two days off writing? Make that five, but it’s over now

On the 16th, I posted about my stumble. I finished that day with 1,752 words, and I was pretty happy with that, considering. Since then, I’ve worked on some publishing tasks, read a bunch of books (seriously, 3 in just one day this week), and—well, that’s it. When I haven’t been working on the publishing stuff, I’ve been reading. I binge. Read, write, whatever. I work best when I binge on work.

So my planned 2 day break for publishing stuff turned into a 5 day break, because of all that reading and my own reluctance to dig into the publishing stuff.

But it’s finally done. I finished up the last of the publishing stuff today, and although it’s a bit late to really go for a lot of words, I’d still like to write more than the 172 words I wrote the moment I finished the publishing stuff. I was anxious to get back to it—and I’d like to hang on to that feeling. I worry that if I relax too much right now, tomorrow I’ll feel pressured to get started again. I don’t want pressure. I want desire. Right now, despite the fact that I’m feeling kind of pooped and stressed, I have desire. So writing it is. :)

I think I’ll aim for a solid hour of writing. Maybe two, but one for sure. I’d just like to cross the 1,000 word mark for the day.

Update—

Unfortunately for my writing, I had an unexpected interruption that pretty much finished my day for me. I was bummed, but hey, it wasn’t the end of the world. I finished with 245 words.

A bit of a stumble

It’s 7:35 pm and I’ve written only 766 words today, in one hour of writing that I did before lunch today. I’m not really sure where the day went, tbh. I started writing late today and stopped for lunch early. I slept badly last night and have had a headache most of the day.

I’d like to go to bed early tonight to make up for that bad sleep, but… I haven’t actually had much energy for writing at all until within the last half hour, which doesn’t bode well for an early bedtime.

So now, I’m going to cut this short and go to work on one of my books. My goal is to write for an hour and see where I end up. My plans to take tomorrow and Monday off writing to work on preparing some stories for publishing hasn’t changed, so I want to end today in a good place. If I can manage another 1,000 words in the next hour, I’ll be happy enough. Less won’t kill me, but why not try for better instead of good enough, huh? ;)

How I back up my writing files

I keep multiple backups of my writing files.

I have saved jobs set up that use yCopy2 from Spacejock software. I’ve been using the program for so many years I can’t even say for sure how long that’s been. It’s a great little program and I love it. If it ever stops working, I’m going to be sad beyond measure.

I use Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, an SD card, an expansion drive, a second computer on my network, a backup directory on my laptop hard drive, and email.

It sounds a little crazy as I write it out, but I like it. Yes, I use a lot of hard drive space to store multiple copies of my important files, but no, I don’t ever get them confused because I have a system that works.

I have a main writing directory for all my writing related files (outside of the Windows My Documents directory). I run my yCopy jobs 2–3 times a day, when I’m ready to break from my work usually, but anytime, really, especially if I’ve accomplished something I want to be sure I don’t lose if a catastrophe were to strike within the next few hours. :D

Yes, I’m also a bit paranoid.

Those yCopy jobs copy my entire writing directory into my Dropbox folder, my Google Drive folder, my OneDrive folder, onto my SD card, onto the expansion drive over the network, and onto the second computer’s hard drive to a folder that mirrors my laptop folder. I manually email myself copies of my Word documents every so often, just as a last ditch safety measure, and once a month, I copy and archive my writing directory to a backup folder on my laptop’s hard drive. I do that one manually, so if there’s ever a problem with yCopy, I will at least have this. I recently cleaned those out to limit how many copies I had, because I was approaching one for every month since July 2012 and that’s a lot of duplicates (especially considering how I back up my word docs as I’m working on a book), and my main writing directory has been growing quite a lot since I became more focused on learning cover design so they were taking up ever more space on my laptop. It’s also the directory where I keep my stock art downloads and that’s been growing too. So… it was time to eliminate some excess. That said, I still have about 4 copies of my writing directory as it existed at the time I made the copies for each of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and monthly for 2016 to date.

Yes, I am terrified of losing work.

Yes, I have pulled files out of some of those folders after I regretted deleting a file from my main writing directory.

Yes, I check the files and associated directories regularly to make sure yCopy is doing the job I need it to do.

Yes, it’s totally worth it. I have peace of mind. If my house burns down, I have the cloud files. If the cloud becomes inaccessible, I have my hard drives. If my computer is stolen, and I get locked out of my cloud drives AND my email, I have my second computer, my expansion drive, and my Kindle. Did I fail to mention that I also use “Send to Kindle” to send my in-progress Word docs to myself each night? Yeah, I do that too.

I know there are probably many more ways to make myself even safer, but this is the level I’m comfortable with. To be honest, I know it’s much more than most people will ever even consider doing, but these files are important to me, and I do my best to treat them that way.

As for my other files, I finally started backing them up too, but I’ll be honest, I just don’t worry about them that much. It’s the thought of losing my books that terrifies me. :D

I think I might break my record today

No pressure, and I’m definitely not saying I will but I feel good, the writing is going well, and I’m going to have some significant free time tonight, so the possibility is there.

This morning’s tally so far makes me optimistic. I’ve never written 6,000 words in one day and I’d love it if I did it today. :)

Hours Words Session WPH
1 1103 1103 1103

And YAY! I just discovered that the paste from Excel is working the way it used it and my table stayed together. The recent WordPress update must have fixed it. :)

And even better, those words in hour 1 were for my stalled out book. :)

Update: I ran out of steam at 4,798 words, so no record breaking day for me. That was 5 hours at 960 wph. I can’t say I minded. I’m enjoying writing too much to care. ;)

Multiple stories at once: first week

I have 8 days worth of words to count now, so my first week writing on multiple stories is done, and I feel like I have something to say about this method: it really works for me.

Thursday—Wednesday, April 7–13
3,003 (4 stories)
1,009 (2 stories)
1,347 (2 stories)
3,557 (4 stories)
3,983 (2 stories)
5,391 (4 stories)
3,583 (3 stories)

Total: 21,873

What’s different about this attempt and any others where I worked on multiple stories regularly?

I can’t say 100% that this is an accurate list, but I do believe it’s close to the truth.

  1. Now: I’m writing in 1 hour blocks, but am free to switch if another story calls strongly to me. Then: my 50 word challenge.
  2. There is no most important story. See the 50 word challenge post again. I write what I’m most interested in writing. :D

That’s really it, the big differences that I think are leading me to write more and stay at it longer. And what it all boils down to is interest in what I’m writing, excitement, and fun.

When I’ve got those, writing is not hard.

The key to success: a high level of interest

I’m only one day away from a great week of writing.

T: 3,003
F: 1,009
S: 1,347
S: 3,557
M: 3,983
T (in progress): 4,097 (at 2:45 pm, after only 4 hours of timed writing, which is remarkably early, and fast, for me to be at such a high word count.)

I believe it has everything to do with my switching between projects and letting myself work on the stuff that I have the highest level of interest for at the moment.

Seriously, I’m doing my best to refrain from falling into the trap of writing what I think I need to write (what will get me a finished book the fastest) and sticking with whatever I have the highest level of interest for. It’s working wonders.

This is the key for me right now.

I’ve finished a novelette length story, started another in the series, and have made good progress with several of my novels. All in all, I’m ecstatic. :D

And I’m also finding that in the end, I think it’s very likely I’ll finish all these stories in about the same amount of time it would take me to finish one if I forced myself to focus. Focus just seems to be another word for “stall” these days.

Or maybe it’s easier to explain this way: focusing doesn’t give my brain time to mull over alternative possibilities for one story without downtime and if I try to keep going instead of taking that downtime, I stall out and start to dread writing, which creates a vicious cycle of too much downtime, while jumping around gives me the time to mull while eliminating the downtime.

More writing, more fun while writing, and more words written. I can’t beat that.

Not a word count success today, but closer than usual

Here’s my progress. Getting closer to that 3,933 a day goal.

Story Hours Words Session WPH
R 1 1165 1165 1165
O 1 1624 459 459
G 1 2015 391 391
Gf 1 2780 765 765
O 1 3146 366 366
R 0.25 3335 189 756

Wish it wasn’t quite so late, because I’d keep writing. I know I could reach my goal. But I need my sleep if I want to feel like trying again tomorrow, and it’s already past my bedtime if I want 8 hours of sleep tonight.

Tomorrow I need to focus on not letting so much time slip past early in the day. I want to be able to write for 3–4 hours before lunch, and another 2–3 hours before late afternoon.

Making progress; accountability for yesterday’s and today’s writing

Considering the day I had yesterday, I’m happy to say I wrote 1009 words yesterday. Most of that was in one session yesterday morning from about 7–8 am, on story R.

Today, I’m working to make up some word count, hoping I’ll get in 8 hours of writing. I’m sticking with what’s working. I’ll do 1 hour for each story: O, R, G, Gf, T, W, plus 2 extra sessions for story O. W is the book I’ve been struggling to finish, but it’ll happen when it happens. I rarely do so many hours of writing in a day, so it’s not a given, but I’m going to try. There’s also a chance I’ll have to be gone for a 4 hour stretch today and if that happens, the 8 hours is going to be really difficult. But I’ll worry about that if it happens. :D

For now, back to writing. I’ve been at it about 25 minutes, but an interruption threw me off a bit and I decided to write this post before I restarted.

Hour: words
1 (story T)
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

I’ll update as I work, because that’s how I like to do it. :)

Today’s progress report

Hour #1 (Story O*): 218 words (notes below)
Hour #2 (Story R): 853 words
Hour #3 (Story G): 996 words (notes below)
Hour #4 (Story Gf): 587 words (notes below)
20 minutes extra on Gf: 349 words

Cumulative words: 3003
Cumulative wph: 693

Hour 1 notes

One hour down. Lots to go.

And unfortunately, I’ve been away from most of these stories so long that if the first one is any indication, my word count is going to be much lower today than I’d hoped.

*Stories I plan to work on today are: O, R, G, Gf, T, W. The letters are as good as any other label, so I’m using it. If it were to try something like story 1, story 2, I’d just get even more confused. At least this way, I can figure out what I’m talking about. By the way, W is the book I’ve been struggling to finish, and O is the book I need to finish this month.

I spent a lot of time just trying to get back up to speed and make some adjustments in the first 5000ish words I had already written.

(I discovered I had screwed up is what happened. I had edited the story the last time I worked on it, and when I read the opening today, it sucked. I pulled the oldest backup I had, and re-did the opening of the story the way it was the first time I wrote it. In my last writing session with this story, I’d gone way beyond fixing typos and making corrections. I don’t have anything against making changes to a story in progress when changes are needed, but changing what happens in a story isn’t the same as changing how I describe what happens. I’d gone in with a heavy hand and attempted to do the latter, and I should have known better. It never works out well for the flow.)

Hour 3 notes

My average words per hour is recovering a bit from that rough first hour. Also, apparently that first book has issues unrelated to getting back into the story, because I’m doing great with the others so far and I’ve had to get back into those too. But it’s now time to switch again. So, back to work! Here’s hoping the increase in speed holds out for the rest of my sessions. :)

Hour 4 notes

Hour 4 turned out to be my last hour. I just ran out of time. I definitely didn’t run out of interest. But I have a busy day tomorrow and I don’t know exactly how much writing I’ll get done so I can’t stay up later. One thing I know though is that I MUST do a better job of managing my use of time. Somehow I let loads of it slip past and ended up struggling (and staying up later than I wanted) just to get in 4 hours.

Time to focus on the 12-month 1,180,000 words challenge

So I’ve been giving some thought to what I can do to get moving on this challenge: 12 months, 1,180,000 words. I need to stay focused. I’ve had to step back from the cover design practice, because I had become well and truly obsessed.

57 of 98 days since January 1 have been zero word days. That’s… scary high. I don’t know that I’ve had that many in so few months at any time since I started writing to publish. Saying that made me wonder, so I pulled up my spreadsheet and set up a quick formula to count and discovered that I do have one period of 98 days that had 68 zero words days in it. That one ended in November 2013.

The fact is, I don’t want any zero word days anymore except for true emergency/sick days and publishing days.

I’ve got to figure out how to make that happen.

One way is to start having more fun with writing. I’m stagnating, I think, under self-imposed expectations, and that’s stealing a lot of the fun from writing. When it isn’t fun, I don’t want to do it.

I want to wake up excited to get started every day. I know I can get back there, but I’m going to have to break through this wall of expectation first.

I’ll be trying to do that today: putting all my fears and expectations aside and writing only what excites me. I have a rule: skip the boring parts. In fact, I have more than one rule: No more length limits / deadlines. Just write the story. Write the parts I like, skip the boring stuff. I also believe that art and great story do not come from purposeful thinking. That came from Dean Wesley Smith, although I can’t remember if he said it in a lecture or on his blog. A search of the blog didn’t turn up anything, so I’m going to assume it was a lecture. I’ve paid to watch several and I recommended them to anyone who asks about them.

As for the cover design practice, here’s what happened.

I’ve made some huge leaps forward with the cover design over the last few weeks, but I started to realize a few days ago that I’m suffering under the lack of a deadline for finishing the covers. In the past, I always waited to do covers until the book was finished and I was doing copy edits. That meant I had a hard deadline of ASAP, because I usually need to get those books published. Without that deadline, I’ve discovered I spend too much time trying variations, avoiding commitment, and being indecisive about whether the cover or the series look is good enough. And although I tried the outsourcing approach, it felt like more work than just doing it myself. And no, I wasn’t satisfied, in any way, with that experience. I won’t be doing it again any time soon. The designer was good, the covers were pretty, but they just weren’t what I wanted, and the whole process took away my control and made publishing a lot less fun.

Outsourcing cover design is not for me. I have 100% decided to stick to doing my own covers for the foreseeable future.

But night before last, I finally decided I have to go back to working on covers only when I’m closer to finishing a book. That’ll impose at least something of a deadline and I won’t be able to get hung up on all the little details that have led me to create 9 different versions of the same cover. Not tweaks. Entirely different versions. Nine. Yes the series needs a cohesive new look, but gah, that’s ridiculous. I have to be able to decide on these things. And I can’t decide when I have what feels like unlimited time—I need time pressure to force me to make decisions.

The fact is, I am very much still in the throes of this obsession. I’m waking up at night with ideas to try and today it’s going to be a challenge to set all that out of my thoughts.

I resisted yesterday, although I didn’t write as I’d planned to. Yesterday, I had to take some time to do my estimated 2016 taxes and make that first payment—something I started, I admit, as a way to avoid getting to work on writing, but it was something that had to be done and once I’d started it, I realized that. I spent about 4.5 hours on it, doing the worksheets, estimating an income that just can’t really be estimated because it’s so variable, and I was wrung out by the time I had made the quarterly payment.

Kind of amazing that I would do taxes to avoid doing something I like as much as I like writing. In the end, I decided to take the easy way out: I paid 100% of last year’s tax liability and decided to just save the rest until I file. I’ll probably owe a shit-ton of tax at that point, but I won’t owe penalties. My hope is to double my income this year, but if it doesn’t happen, I’m safe and won’t have paid in too much.

Finally, though, it’s time to focus.

Today I will work on multiple stories.

Tomorrow I’ll do the same.

I’m going to resist the trap of forcing myself to work only on the story I need to finish next. That method is how I become stuck and lose my forward momentum. Total word count is the goal. If my word count is going up, that means I’m getting my books written.

I won’t worry about finishing that book I’ve been struggling with (not like I’m expecting massive sales from it anyway, so what’s it matter when it gets done?).

I will write for one hour on each story that I have in progress in each of my series. That’s 6 stories, so 6 hours of writing.

I’ll write a few extra sessions on one particular story: I have 20 days to finish that one, with about 45,000 words left on it, meaning I need about 2,250 words every day for those 20 days. If it takes three sessions (~750 wph), then I’ll need to write for 8 hours; if it only takes two sessions (~1,125 wph), then I’ll only need to write for 7 hours. That last is what I’d prefer, but we’ll see.

I’ve only written for 7 hours in a day a few times; it’s not something I find success at often. But I’m hoping the switch between stories will keep me fresh and keep my interest going. We’ll see.

My long-term plan for 5 hours of writing a day hasn’t changed. I won’t be writing on every story, every day, but for now—until I catch up a bit and get excited about my books again, I do plan to do just that.

If I do as much writing as I want to do today, I could break my current one-day word count record and crack the 6,000 words in a day barrier. I’ve never written 6,000 words of fiction in one day before, not since I started keeping records. It’s also highly unlikely I ever did it before I kept records.

So, time to get to it. :D I’ll update later in a separate post. This one is already too long.