You know how you avoid looking at your schedule and the clock because you know if you do, you’ll find out it’s way past time for you to start writing on the new schedule you made for yourself last night and how you get this feeling that as long as you don’t look, you haven’t screwed up yet?
That’s me, this morning.
I just looked at the clock and my calendar and I am now having to admit that I’m two and a half hours late getting started.
:'(
FYI, it’s a nice schedule too.
I set aside the following time for writing, daily, including weekends: 8–11 am & 2–3 pm. It adds up to 28 hours a week.
I figured it based on some ridiculously grand plans I have for the year. But those plans aren’t so ridiculous at all, if I actually put in the damn writing time. The only reason they’re “ridiculously grand” is because I still haven’t shown that I can write more than 268,191 in a year. In fact, my average for 3.5 years is 252,190 because I appear to be quite regular on an annual basis with my irregular output!
But I want 2016 to be the year that changes. Therefore, the plans…
Novels: 6 x 60,000
Novels: 12 x 50,000
Short stories: 12 x 10,000
Novellas: 4 x 25,000
1,180,000 words / 12 months = 98,333 words / 4 hours a day = 3,233 @ 808 wph
Yes, that’s a higher WPH than my average. But there’s a benefit to squeezing the amount of work you need to do into a shorter amount of time. It’s been proven time and again that if most people have time to waste, they’ll waste it. I want to stop wasting so much time so I can write more.
Because there are two variables to the writing more equation: time and speed.
Spend more time and do it faster. Combine the two and you have two multipliers instead of one.
But anyway, today was to be day one of getting back to it, and I’ve already screwed up. Cue the silent screaming while I remind myself that I don’t have to give up on today just because the schedule is a bust.