Day: July 29, 2014

For the next month or so, I’d like to start averaging around 3,000 words a day. I have deadlines that I’d really like to get ahead of if I can.

To do that, I’m going to need a plan. My experiments with the 5 minute sessions have proved to be very helpful with both focus and speed so I’m hoping I can increase my daily word counts by creating a daily plan based around them. Nothing so specific as a daily schedule because I am not going there again. :D

A general plan will let me set each day up however I need.

Hour 1
Hour 2
Hour 3
Hour 4

For each hour I have a goal of reaching 750 words. To start with I’m going to do ten 5 minute sessions per hour, with a goal of maintaining an average of 75 words for those 5 minute sessions. As long as I can stick to those goals, I can reach 3,000 words each day.

This is also today’s plan.

Hour 1 (did 8 sessions, reached 313 words, and yeah, I just deleted another chunk because this book is dragging right now and I can’t get any momentum going, also went over my hour)
Hour 2 (cancelled)
Hour 3 (cancelled)
Hour 4 (cancelled)

This is easier to type than the actual times I plan to do the writing, but I do have them scheduled just as I did in my previous planning posts. First hour starts at 3:30 p.m. See ya!

From 3:45 until now, I’ve reached 490 words. I couldn’t stop fixing stuff and never actually did but 2 sessions in that entire time because I kept getting distracted so…yeah. I’m just going to call that editing and move on.

Hour 1 to start shortly after a break.

Later…

Okay, today’s writing turned into a mess and I’m not sure how to prevent these kinds of days from happening, or if I can.

(1) My critical brain kicked in and that accounted for a lot of the time. Nothing I wrote was good enough. (2) I couldn’t get any momentum going because I couldn’t settle on a “next move” for the story. (3) The story wasn’t flowing, so when I tried to write I was constantly deleting, and again, no momentum.

All those have overlap with each other, of course, but that’s the best I can come up with for why things just wouldn’t move along tonight.

Honestly, I should have switched stories before it got so late that I’m now going to have to end the night with less than a third of the word count I needed today. I’m sitting at a net increase of 804 words, and they’re all on one novel (the one I’m supposed to publish in August).

Since I’d like to have a better day tomorrow, I’m not stopping tonight until I fix whatever’s wrong and start something that I can pick up and run with tomorrow.

Faster writing, possibly more motivated writing (could be wrong, could be that I just finally got myself started again), definitely more typos, and definitely not as enamored of my own stuff as I should be when I re-read.

However, I was having an issue with that last item even before I started the 5 minute sessions, so maybe that’s not a result of the 5 minute sessions at all.

The mistakes? Definitely, absolutely, a result of the 5 minute sessions. I’m not taking time between each of them to tidy up when I’ve just written, which is exactly what I started out doing and should have kept doing but didn’t.

I just don’t know if I’m going to be able to work like this for an entire book. Part of me wants to keep it up, and part of me wants to go back to trying 1 hour blocks of a more leisurely nature so I can make sure what I’m writing satisfies me.

So, as mentioned, I have a dilemma, and I can’t decide what to do.

I said recently that I was going to try to make faster decisions, so … time to decide.

Before I set aside the 5 minute sessions, I should make a real effort to take the time between sessions to go over what I just wrote and correct any mistakes. Or, better yet, I should do it in the first few minutes of the my next hour long block I have planned, right before I start writing again as long as I can keep it short so it doesn’t take more than 5 to 10 minutes. Can I go over 800ish words in 5 to 10 minutes? Surely I can do that.

Alright then, that’s settled. Time to get to work. I’m starting about an hour and a half later than I’d planned to start today.

Later…

So that didn’t work. At all. I’ll have to rethink this. I spent nearly my entire first hour on the read through and fixes. I don’t know if I’m just in a really critical frame of mind or if every book I’ve written since January just really, really sucks.

I’m leaning toward the former, but maybe I should revisit one of my previous works just to see…

Truthfully, that isn’t likely to help and I’d like to stop needed that kind of reassurance from myself! :o

Anyway, gotta get to work or I’m going to end up with another day where I do the bare minimum, and I don’t want that.