Year: 2015

My new to-the-point production schedule

Lynn

I think I mentioned before that I had to toss the last production schedule I made. I archived it, but I don’t think I’ll be revisiting it. It included deadlines and word count calculations detailed by book that were just too much for my poor brain to handle. To be blunt, it stressed me out. I’ve mentioned before that the way I handle stress is to shut down and do nothing.

I’ve done a lot of nothing over the last few weeks. Changing that is a high priority this week.

First I calculated how many days I can realistically expect myself to work in a year. This is an ideal number, of course, but I have to start somewhere.

Holidays 4
Unexpected 12
Vacation (wkdays) 15
Weekends 104
total days off 135
total working days 230

Then I calculated the number of words I would like to write in the next 12 months based on the release schedule I’d like to maintain for each series—no deadlines attached.

Year’s production Number avg wc total wc
Series #3 6 65,000 390,000
Pen names series #1 4 50,000 200,000
Series #2 4 50,000 200,000
Short stories 12 8,000 96,000
Series #1 4 35,000 140,000
Stand-alone novels 2 50,000 100,000
New pen name novels 1 50,000 50,000
1,176,000

Those gave me my numbers to work from and this was the result:

5,113 words

That’s the number of words I need to write each weekday if I want to reach that level. It seems overwhelming, but I broke it down further into my two daily sessions to fit into my schedule.

6 (hours)
3 2,557 852.17 wph
3 2,557 852.17 wph

Then, for comparison, I calculated my necessary daily average.

3,222 words

That’s the daily average I need to reach and maintain if I want to write all the books on this production schedule within the next 12 months.

It’s my back up plan.

Then I asked myself if this is what I really want.

Yes. It is.

I have so many stories I want to tell before they fade away and become uninteresting to me. The ideas are there and I don’t want to miss my chance to write as many of them as possible before… whatever happens. I’m not dying or anything, not that I know of anyway, but every day that slips away from me makes me just a little bit more afraid that I’ll never get all these stories written before I die. It’s a scary thing to think about, tbh.

Can I do it? I don’t know. I know it won’t get done if I don’t try. Anyway, this is the ideal, again, and I can accept that it won’t be the reality, but it’s what I want, regardless of all that.

If I find it impossible to reach the 5,113 words after giving it my all this week, I can fall back to the “write every day” alternative.

I don’t like word count goals and I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to change that. But—

I know where I’m at and where I want to go, and even if I never look at this again, I will have that number sitting in the back of my brain, reminding me not to quit early, and not to expect less from myself, because this is what it will take to write everything I want to write, not even as quickly as I want to write it.

The first thing I need to do? Stop being a slow writer. 852 words an hour is much faster than I’m used to writing.

Is the schedule improving my daily word count average (for real)?

Lynn

I was ready to do a bit more analysis of whether or not my schedule is helping me write more. This time I decided to get real and use a formula to figure out if the change I noted previously was actually statistically significant. It’s been so long since I’ve had a statistics class that I had to turn to the web for answers. One web search later, I found THIS, which I adapted quite easily to work with my daily log of word counts.

I had noted the start date for the schedule in my daily log, so it was easy to make the formulas work with my own spreadsheet. Here’s what I came up with.

658 average value of data before change (daily word counts)
741 average value of data since change (daily word counts)
952 standard deviation of data since change
133 number of data points since change (how many days I’ve been on the schedule)
1.009489 T-Value
15.73% probability that the change is only due to chance

So, I wouldn’t say the change in word count is significant. After a bit of further reading on Wikipedia, the problem I’m seeing is that I have no idea what to set as the significance level. I can’t deny that it’s quite possible the increase in my word count was/is temporary and could have other causes. The truth is that my word counts often improve after I make a change. And honestly, if I look at a rolling 7 day average, I can’t see any patterns at all.

Other than the pattern that sometimes I write a lot and sometimes I don’t write anything! Consistency isn’t something I’m good at.

I did have several more 3,000 word days recently than usual (I’ve never had three of them so close together before), but on the other hand, it had to happen sometime, right? I now have 1,112 days worth of entries and I’m adding a new one every day.

All I’ve really done is give myself something else to think about, unfortunately, while I try to pull myself out of this funk and get on with the writing.

Yuck, yuck, yuck

Lynn

I have no idea why I’ve been avoiding writing ever since my last good day of writing, but yep, that’s exactly what’s been going on. If I don’t get restarted soon, I’m going to be so far behind I’ll never catch up.

I have decided: it doesn’t matter why I stopped. Trying to find a reason is just another way for me to keep putting off getting started again, and getting started again is the only thing that matters right now. I don’t want this to drag out any longer. In the last 8 days I’ve written 690 words total.

I’ve been binge reading as a way to distract myself. I’m not sure that’s been a good idea.

Challenge: Friday, 8/21

Lynn

The challenge today is to stay on schedule and write 1,000 words for each of the last three days that I wrote nothing.

The numbers 1–6 represent the 6 hours of scheduled writing from 9–12 & 1–4. The second number is where I should be at the end of the hour to be on schedule.

The true challenge is to stay ahead for all 6 hours.

1 503 221
2 1,007 364
3 1,510 –
4 2,013 –
5 2,517 –
6 3,020 –

11 am – as you can see from the numbers above I’m going to have to pick up the pace if I want to finish at 4 pm today.

I’m tired and my head feels like I’m sleep deprived. The truth is, although I’ve been getting about 7 hours of sleep time a night the last three or four days, I’ve been waking up during the night more than usual and losing sleep because of it. I probably had about 6 hours of sleep last night if I’m being generous. The days of me being fresh on 5 to 6 hours of sleep are long gone. These days 6.5 hours isn’t enough to get rid of the fuzzy headed feeling. It’s takes a solid seven hours of sleep before I don’t notice a difference in how I feel. Maybe a short nap is in order before I lose more time to this lethargy. I do believe I could write all my words between 1 and 4 if I felt more energetic. I’m not saying I will, just that it’s possible. All I know is that if I keep feeling this way, I’m certainly not going to make it to 3,000.

UPDATE: I didn’t return to writing after I stopped for that nap. It just didn’t turn out to be a good day for me and writing, although I’m glad I didn’t give in without at least trying. Two hours was certainly better than another 0 word day.

Today I need a challenge

Lynn

A few days ago, I felt like a challenge and that worked out well for me. Today I don’t particularly feel like a challenge but I need one because I need to get writing again before I fall too far behind.

The last three days have been a mess. I’ve written a great big fat 0 words and I don’t know what to blame for that other than my own inability to get started. Getting started is really the hardest thing I do all day when it comes to anything that needs to be done.

The night of my great day (when I didn’t even want to stop because the writing was going so well) I read through what I’d written and made some notes of things to correct or adjust. I didn’t find enough to turn me off the story, so I’m not sure why the hold up. It might not be related, but I do think it’s worth noting.

I’ve also been working on a few of my websites the last couple of days. Kind of obsessively, tbh. I thought I’d gotten it all out of my system finally, but yesterday, right when I was supposed to start writing, I decided I absolutely needed to write something for at least one of the sites.

Trust me when I say that’s not true. The site hasn’t had an update in over a year. I doubt doing one then mattered at all.

I want to challenge myself to write 1,000 words today for each day that I wrote nothing AND to finish proofing a story I was supposed to have finished proofreading weeks ago.

So… at least 3,000 words today on schedule is the challenge. :)

 

Jeeves and Wooster

Lynn

I’ve been watching Jeeves & Wooster and boggling over a young Hugh Laurie of House fame. :) He was such a cute young man, and of course, Bertie Wooster is nothing like Dr. House so that just makes it all so much more unbelievably fun.

Jeeves & WoosterI would have never realized this show existed if I hadn’t been reading P. G. Wodehouse of late, and then at my latest visit to my favorite bookstore within 200 miles (McKay’s) I came across a set of DVDs for the show.

Jeeves & Wooster covers ground that several of the stories in the collections I’ve read so far covers, but I don’t mind. Now every time I read more in the Jeeves and Wooster series, I hear Hugh Laurie’s and Stephen Fry’s voices. It’s not a terrible hardship. :)

I feel like a challenge

Lynn

I have the intention of writing about 3,000 words today by 4 pm, but I’ve noticed I’m writing at a really nice pace (using timed writing, during my scheduled writing time) and I’m thinking I might like to try a personal challenge today.

I think I’ll try to write my 3,000 by 12 today and take the afternoon to do some proofreading I’ve been putting off.

The first set of numbers is cumulative, the second set is by session. I’ll update as I go.

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136

Ah! I slowed down considerably for the next few sessions, but I’m going to keep trying. I’m also about an hour behind after a few unexpected interruptions.

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136
466 30 932 182 15 728
638 45 851 172 15 688
802 60 802 164 15 656

Well, that didn’t work out. :)

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136
466 30 932 182 15 728
638 45 851 172 15 688
802 60 802 164 15 656
1,030 75 824 228 15 912
1,216 90 811 186 15 744

As you can see, I only managed 90 minutes of timed writing sessions during the 9–12 portion of my schedule today. I will need to improve that considerably to end up where I want to end up today.

My revised challenge is to keep up my pace and reach 3020 today before 4 pm.

The following chart shows where I should be at the end of each hour—not timed hour of writing, but the hour into my schedule. 9–12 comprises hours 1–3, and 1–4 comprises hours 4–6.

3,020
1 503 284
2 1,007 466
3 1,510 1,216
4 2,013
5 2,517
6 3,020

I definitely didn’t meet this challenge but I’m not too far behind where I should be at this time so that’s good. :)

I’ll be back after lunch.

I’m back! And… ouch.

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136
466 30 932 182 15 728
638 45 851 172 15 688
802 60 802 164 15 656
1,030 75 824 228 15 912
1,216 90 811 186 15 744
1,404 110 766 188 20 564
1,514 120 757 110 10 660
1,717 135 763 203 15 812
1,841 145 762 124 10 744
2,082 165 757 241 20 723
3,020
1 503 284
2 1,007 466
3 1,510 1,216
4 2,013 1,514
5 2,517 2,082
6 3,020

As you can see, my pace has settled around 700ish words an hour since lunch and that means I’m behind, mostly because I just cannot get my timed writing to match up to my scheduled time. I’m at 2.75 hours of timed writing even though I’ve been “on the clock” for 5. I have one hour to complete my words or I’ll end up writing past 4 pm (because I’m getting 3000 words today, one way or another).

Okay, final numbers for the day. I did make it to 3,000, but not before 4 pm. I stopped at about 5:09. However, 240 minutes is only 4 hours but I worked for 7. Not a great work/break ratio there.

words time wph words time wph
284 15 1,136 284 15 1,136
466 30 932 182 15 728
638 45 851 172 15 688
802 60 802 164 15 656
1,030 75 824 228 15 912
1,216 90 811 186 15 744
1,404 110 766 188 20 564
1,514 120 757 110 10 660
1,717 135 763 203 15 812
1,841 145 762 124 10 744
2,082 165 757 241 20 723
2,309 180 770 227 15 908
2,581 195 794 272 15 1,088
2,764 210 790 183 15 732
2,937 225 783 173 15 692
3,196 240 799 259 15 1,036

(Sorta) new and (slightly) improved

Lynn

I’ve been back on the timers today. Although I have no intention of abandoning my schedule, I’m not going to pretend that it’s been doing much for my productivity lately. It hasn’t.

So today, I brought out my trusty timer and started running it.

It has helped a surprising amount. Over 3,000 words worth in fact.

There’s also the fact that I’ve had a bit of a mental shift when it comes to all these tools I need to get me to write. I read a (really) short book on procrastination yesterday that actually spoke quite loudly to me when it started going on about “loss of freedom.”

I realized at that moment that structure often makes me feel like I’ve lost my freedom.

I’ve decided that thought has to go. Frankly, it’s irrational anyway. Even with a schedule, I’m still in charge. In fact, it’s my schedule and I’m the one who wants myself to follow it, so I can do more of the things that are important to me, so how can it be a loss of my freedom?

It’s a paradox! And one I’m not willing to live with any longer. :D

A slow day for writing

Lynn

At the end of the day I was writing only 216 words an hour. I did get up in the middle of writing and dust a few things.

I don’t have any idea why I’ve become so slow. I didn’t used to be anywhere near this slow, but lately (almost the entire last year in fact), I’m even having trouble cracking 500 words an hour. It’s… mind-boggling. Something has to be up. I just can’t see what that something is.

Oh, well. On to tomorrow. I worked the best I could during my scheduled time today. I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

The schedule and self-sabotage

Lynn

I’ve dedicated myself to working with my schedule this week. Staying focused is hard for me. But this week, I’m going to push myself to write during my scheduled writing time. It’s 10:26 and I definitely let myself get distracted from my schedule this morning.

I have to be careful of distractions because I often forget what I was doing before I became distracted. This morning I got up a little late, showered a little long, and then still had to have breakfast even though as I was preparing it I was fully aware of the fact that I should be planning to eat at my computer. I chose not to because I had started reading an article I wanted to finish (big mistake) and then that article had several linked articles that I really wanted to read that I was afraid I’d forget to read later, so I kept pushing off my writing start time.

I have a decision to make right now: finish the articles or start writing, and I’ll be honest, I’m leaning toward finishing the articles and I don’t even know why. They’re about being prolific and maybe that’s it, maybe there’s a part of me that thinks I’ll learn something new and exciting that will suddenly make me break through the wall that keeps me writing slowly most of the time and I’ll totally make up for the wasted writing time just by writing faster.

Isn’t it wonderful to be able to see one’s self-sabotaging behaviors and yet still not be able to do anything about them?

Anyway, it’s 10:21 now and I’m going to skim through these articles and account for the time here just so I can face how much time I am wasting.

I’m back! I did that in record time, because it’s now 10:29 and I read three articles (found nothing new or exciting there at all!), deleted them from Evernote, and am back to this post.

Now, it’s time to get serious here. I have writing to do and I shouldn’t have let myself off the hook today to get started on time. I’m left with 1.5 hours until my break. I want to make them count.

My daily word count has increased since I began following a schedule

Lynn

I had a theory that my daily word count hadn’t increased with my schedule because of how often I seem to be missing the mark when it comes to actually sticking to it.

I was wrong. :)

I wanted the numbers to back up my theory and they didn’t. I then found myself wanting to adjust the parameters of my analysis but realized almost immediately that this would be an attempt to make the numbers prove what I wanted them to prove. So I stepped back to give this some more thought.

I realized I was probably just looking for justification to abandon my schedule. I’ve since moved on (that post yesterday was written after I started this one). I’m glad I resisted!

Although my overall daily average is still down from 2012 and 2013, it’s better than 2014 and even the all time average up until the date I began following the 9–12 & 1–4 schedule.

Since I began the 9–12 & 1–4 schedule: 744 words a day average
All time before the schedule: 658 words a day average

It’s enough of a difference that I can’t ignore it. I wasn’t very productive in 2014 or the early part of 2015 and the schedule has clearly saved me from more of the same.

The only other thing of note is that my daily average for the time period during which I used the 5 minute sessions was just over 1,400 words a day. I was trying to hit a deadline during that time and I was scheduling my 5 minute sessions in one hour blocks and scheduling 5 or 6 of those hour long blocks every day. I take this to mean that if I can stick my current schedule more often and get in the 5 to 6 hours of writing, I can hope to approach or exceed these same numbers without the stress of the timed writing. :) I would still like to see myself reach a daily average of 2,000 words because that would fit with the life I want. :)

 

Knowing something needs doing will have to be enough

Lynn

My response to the pressure that deadlines create? Complete and total shutdown. I don’t deal well with anxiety, stress, overwhelming goals or odds, or pressure. I used to believe I worked better under pressure, but I think that’s just something I told myself after the fact because I had come up against a hard deadline that left me no wiggle room and I had finally overcame the inertia holding me back and got down to business. In a limited sense, I do work better under pressure—because outside pressure can actually make me work whereas I might not work otherwise. As far as quality of that work, well, there’s just no way to know. Doing something is better than doing nothing in most cases, so there you go.

The problem with writing as a career is that there are almost no hard deadlines. Even when something has been promised to a publisher, most writers know they can ask for an extension if they ask soon enough. How hard you consider a publisher’s deadline will greatly depend on how concerned you are with your reputation and how important your self-image as a promise-keeper is to you.

I don’t know how I’d handle it, to be honest, but I have this fear that if I weren’t my own publisher, I’d be in trouble. I generally keep promises, if I see the sense in it and if I care about the person to whom I made the promise, but if I can rationalize it away, then all bets are off. I rarely bend over backwards to make most other people’s lives easier than my own.

I hope this is the last post I ever write about this topic, because I’ve come to a realization today. I have to stop setting personal deadlines and goals and start focusing on just doing the work day in and day out. Consistency is going to be key for me, because I’m not looking for goals: I’m looking for a way of life. At this moment in time, I want my fiction to be the way I earn my living until the day I die. I’m not saying that’ll never change, because I’d like to live a long time and have a long life and maybe that’ll mean I come up on the day when I’m ready for something different. But that’s not today, and I doubt it’ll be next week or next year.

I want to get up each day and I want to write. Some days it’s obvious I’ll write more than others, but overall, I want to write every day and I want a routine that makes it easy to do.

I can’t keep stressing over the goals that I’m not even supposed to be worried about right now, because I’ve got the schedule. The schedule is not working well at the moment, but I’m not giving up on it. It’ll be the backbone of my writing routine.

This post came about because of the aforementioned realization. I was choking under the pressure of the production schedule I created when I decided to focus on my income producing series.

Today, I had to face what I’ve been doing to myself. I made that schedule to see if I could squeeze in the other books I want to write alongside the ones I need to write if I’m serious about focusing on growing my income for a while. Of course, it became a ridiculous expression of everything I know is wrong with the way I think sometimes. I had input deadlines for every book I want to write between now and next year and I had compressed those deadlines to the point that I was going to have to write more words every day than I’d ever written in my life and maintain that pace for weeks at a time.

To remind you, if I focus on my income producing series to the exclusion of my other books, I can write half the number of books in the same time period and yet in all probability earn more money. There’s just no world in which this isn’t the smart thing for me to do, knowing how slow I write.

And yet, there I was this morning, staring at that production schedule and wondering why I’ve been having so much trouble getting myself to write since I created it. It should have been inspiring, I told myself, because it showed what I could accomplish if I just buckled down.

But it wasn’t.

My sanity returned after a flurry of scribbled notes and much too much time spent trying to make it work out to a smaller, more reasonable daily word count average. It’s never going to work out. I just can’t count on myself to write at a steady pace each day and I can’t work to these deadlines. The reason I love writing for a living is because I can take the daily ups and downs I naturally experience and smooth them out into what will become the whole. A book is a book when it’s done; it doesn’t matter if I wrote 1000 words a day for 50 days or if I wrote 0 words for 25 days and 2000 a day for the rest, because I still end up with my book. I can count on my averages. I can’t count on much else.

I don’t want to stop trying to improve my averages, and I’ll still keep trying to stick with my schedule as best I can. I want to improve. But I don’t want to do it with deadlines hanging over my head.

And that’s all I really wanted to say today.

Why I don’t outline my stories

Lynn

All the books I outlined didn’t get finished. I stopped outlining and started finishing things. It was an amazing discovery for me.

One of my series is getting complicated on me though, with overlapping time frames and the like, and I’ve had to create an Excel spreadsheet with dates down one side and book titles across the top and fill in the blanks. It feels weird but I can already feel how much of a help it’s going to be.

My outline ideas were so boring. My stories were boring. I can only have wild flights of fancy as I’m writing, it seems, and that’s what it takes for me to write interesting stories. Some people are creative while outlining (I assume) but I’m not. Every idea I got was just so bland and they made for bland books that bored me to death when I tried to write them.

And that’s why I don’t outline.

I do sometimes write a paragraph or so at the end of what I’m working on that is full of questions to myself about where I want to go next and this can sometimes help me stay focused. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but I’ll leave it there until I either reach that point or decide against it.

Too many days off

Lynn

Now I have to make up for all those days off. I hate playing catch up and I rarely succeed, but if I don’t want to end up moving my deadline, I’m going to have to make a point of writing as much as I can during my scheduled writing time and not get distracted.

Deadline I need to meet

Lynn

I have a deadline for one of my books (the next book in the income producing series) and if I don’t get my work ethic moving in the right direction, I’m going to have to change that date. I don’t want to. I always change dates for deadlines and I’d like to not do that this time.

I have big plans for the future and I need to start sticking some (most) of these self-imposed deadlines or I’m going to have to rethink those plans. I don’t want to do that either. I like my plans just the way they are and they involve me putting out more books, faster, and reaping the financial rewards. Make hay, as they say. The sun is shining. Tomorrow there might be rain.

In light of that, I’m off now to get to work writing. I don’t have quotas to meet on a daily basis because I still believe the schedule is where I’m going to find my success, but I would like to reach 2,000 by my noon break if I can. That’s about an hour and a half away and that means I have to get started and keep going, because 1,333 words an hour is one of those things that I believe I can do but I have yet to prove it to myself or anyone else. :) See ya!

Bought a pretty journal (can’t bring myself to write in it)

Lynn

Isn’t that ironic? I bought a lovely journal to write in, but now I can’t bring myself to write in it because it’s so pretty.

Persian Splendor JournalThis isn’t a surprise to me. I have lots of pretty journals that I haven’t been able to write in. When I get ready to write, I end up pulling out one of the hundred or so spiral notebooks I got for $0.10 apiece at Walmart about eight or nine years ago. I love writing in those things and I don’t know why. I guess it feels disposable. A hardback journal doesn’t and I worry about mistakes.

(I have a real soft spot for blues. Definitely my favorite color!)

Reading too many self-help books of late

Lynn

This is a common problem for me: I read too many self-help books. It’s my favorite kind of nonfiction.

Right now, I’m reading Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith and Four Seconds by Peter Bregman. The sad fact is that I read so many of them, they all get mixed up in my head and I couldn’t tell you much about any of them within a week or two of finishing them. I read Better Than Before a while back, and I remember thinking it was great, but I have no idea what I took away from it now that it’s been a few weeks. :o

I do believe when I finish Triggers, I’m going to take a self-help reading hiatus for the rest of the year and devote my extra time to reading fiction. (I’ve read about as much as I want to of Four Seconds after skipping around the chapters and reading those that interested me.) It’s time to start devoting more time to action experiments instead of thought experiments. :D

A note about my sporadic daily writing journal

Lynn

Another experiment that hasn’t played out the way I expected. I thought keeping up a daily writing journal might give me insight into my struggle to improve my average daily word counts, but I’m finding that more often than not, instead of inspiring me to stay focused, it’s draining energy away from my fiction writing. It’s procrastination by journal and that’s not what I want at all. :o

It’s debatable if I’ll keep the journal going. This weekend I’m going to forgo it, and see how I feel come Monday.

 

Writing: July 23, 2015, Thursday

Lynn

9:59 am

Guilty! I’m starting late again today, although I swear I was ready to go at 9 but something came up. My kids return to school shortly and I know my time will be easier to monitor then, so I’m just biding my time and trying to stay on track as much as I can until that big shift happens.

Now, time to get to work. I have 2 hours before 12 and I’d like to make some real progress this morning!

Writing: July 22, 2015, Wednesday

Lynn

9:49 am

Late start this morning. I can only blame myself because I sat down to write right at 9 am. WIFI going off as soon as I save this post. I feel really focused this morning with my plan. Stick to the schedule. Devote myself to the next book in my highest earning series. Maybe get some time to write on a different book this afternoon if this morning goes well. Here I go!

11:25 am

No words yet! More messing around after I made fresh tea. I’m not sure what’s going on but I think I’m past it now. I’m getting started.

1:48 pm

I’m at 181 words for the day. :o

3:42 pm

At 438 words for the day so far. It’s not more because I napped. I didn’t mean to, except that I really did because I got so sleepy sitting here that my head actually nodded. So I reared back in my seat and closed my eyes for a quick nap. It’s only 15 minutes until 4 pm but I might keep going after that.

3:56 pm

I stopped with 460 words for the day. Getting back into something I haven’t written on in a week just about always takes me a while. I also wrote a novelette in the meantime, and that didn’t help either. Because I didn’t keep working on this story while I wrote the other, I lost my focus on it.