Tag: Planning

Posts in which I discuss plans, do some planning, or just make it up as I go.

Starting somewhere so I can end up elsewhere

LynnLeave a comment

Part 1 of The Slow Writer’s Guide to Becoming Prolific

March and April have marked the beginning of my plan to create a slow writer’s guide to becoming prolific. After a strong start back in 2012 that lasted a few years, but then suffered from a bunch of life changes that seemed to hit one after another, my plans to write and publish a lot of books didn’t pan out.

From 2012 to 2023, I published books, don’t get me wrong, 44 unique titles of which 23 were novels. But I didn’t publish the number of books I wanted to publish. And most of those titles were published in the first half of the eleven year span. You can take a quick look at my progress page to see that.

In March, I began working on a way to get myself writing regularly again. It’s worked out very well.

So, step one of the slow writer’s plan to become prolific was to set a small goal I really couldn’t miss unless I really just didn’t want to make a success out of this at all. I set a goal of writing every day, and to make it count, I added a minimum word count. I had avoided that in the past, or I’d made it so small that it never really felt like it added up to anything. This time I decided not to do that. I wanted it to amount to something.

Thus began my streak of writing >200 words every day (fiction only). As of this writing, the streak is ongoing and it’s gained me 14,093 words toward my plan to be prolific.

I don’t do much editing of what I write, except I really do, because I work on my text as I go until it’s telling the story I want to tell. I don’t worry about much else. I have a decent grasp of grammar and I’m not prone to making many spelling mistakes. So I write mostly publishable words. These words are good words and they’re adding up. This is a good thing. :)

First things first, everything else last

Lynn

I posted about my goals in the last post. The first hurdle is to get to a sustained average of 1,300 words a day.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s just an average or a daily minimum word count, as long as I’m writing about 9,100 words a week.

Based on my own history, expecting myself to binge write a whole bunch of words two or three days a week is unrealistic. I will need to write daily or at least most days to reach this goal.

Getting myself to maintain any kind of consistency with the writing itself has never been easy for me. For the last several years, it’s been unbelievably tough. But I’m persistent, and I’m here to try again. :)

Time to get comfortable

Lynn

Last night, I sat down and played with some numbers. I really wanted to see what it would take to get myself to a point where I am earning a really comfortable living from writing my fiction, using somewhat conservative numbers but not so conservative that it is depressing.

The outcome wasn’t unexpected.

But as usual, even though the numbers are hopeful and seem realistically possible, they are the same numbers I keep coming back to—and that I have yet to be able to reach and sustain for more than a few days in a row.

To make a living, I need to write about 1,300 words a day if sales stay about the same for the number of words written based on historical earnings for 2022–2023. To live very comfortably, I need to write about 3,600 words a day. Both these numbers are rounded up to the nearest 100 words.

I’ve tried in the past to reach and sustain a 3,600 words a day streak and failed at it even though it only requires about 600 words an hour for 6 hours a day. I can write 600 words an hour, and it’s not a terrible stretch for me. But the 6 hours a day, or even the routine of maintaining daily writing, is where I hit a wall.

All that said, I am here today, writing this, because I want to give it another go. I really want to live more comfortably than I do now and anything averaged out long term between 1,300 and 3,600 words a day has the potential to get me there.

Today’s overarching goal: write 3,600 words.

Today’s specific goals:

  • Finish a short story
  • Finish a chapter in a serialized WIP
  • Finish about half of another short story

Plans for the year—2022

Lynn

I’m just pasting this from my year in review post so I don’t forget I’ve already planned this out. :D

Here’s the plan.

1) Start a 1,000 words a day streak. That would get me about 183,000 words before the end of the year.

2) Focus on finishing each book quickly instead of jumping between projects.

3) Work on more than one project at a time. This doesn’t contradict number two, because it is based on working on the same multiple projects each day. I have two pen names. I also have three types of stories under one pen name (novels, short stories, and my experiment with a serial). I also have different series. I will settle on a way to choose which projects get worked on and then I’ll work on them until they’re done.

Year in review—2021

Lynn

Oh, boy. 2021 was not a great year for me in a lot of ways. I feel like I escaped it by the skin of my teeth, and in some ways, I feel like I’m still stuck there, trying to get out.

I wrote that first paragraph before things went bad in 2022, but I do think I finally escaped 2021 at the end of the year. I started off 2022 in a way that feels good. It didn’t last, but at least the issues of 2021 didn’t linger past their expiration date.

If there’s anything I learned from the mess I made of the year, it’s to not wait when I’m stuck in a book.

Looking back, I can see in February 2020 I was having an issue with a book that didn’t get resolved until I sat down in 2021 at the end of the year and made myself just claw my way through the material until I had something that worked. A lot of the stuff I was unhappy with ended up in the end product. It wasn’t bad. I was the problem. And the hardest truth is the one that says if I had just tossed all those words back in 2020 (multiple times if necessary) and started over from any point that felt like a good place to restart, I could have finished several more books instead of staying stuck.

2021 was my worst year for production of words since I started keeping track in 2012. It edged out 2020 by 1,515 words.

Two bad years in a row could be a death knell for my career unless I can improve dramatically in 2022.

The first half of 2022 has been just as bad, but I do still think I can recover.

Here’s the plan.

1) Start a 1,000 words a day streak. That would get me about 183,000 words before the end of the year.

2) Focus on finishing each book quickly instead of jumping between projects.

3) Work on more than one project at a time. This doesn’t contradict number two, because it is based on working on the same multiple projects each day. I have two pen names. I also have three types of stories under one pen name (novels, short stories, and my experiment with a serial). I also have different series. I will settle on a way to choose which projects get worked on and then I’ll work on them until they’re done.

I’m not going to post my month by month word counts for 2021. Too much trouble, and no one cares to be honest.

I published a novella, started a serial, and published a short story in 2021.

2021 words: 34,134

Well, back to timed writing!

Lynn

My 2022 goals are off to a slow start. The plan is to publish something (novel, short, whatever) every month. I’ve lost some momentum into this new year because I got sick early in the month, and I’ve had a hard time getting moving again.

Last night, after the umpteenth time waiting too late to start (even though I stay up late sometimes, I haven’t been lately, and I haven’t had any willpower at all left once it gets late, so no matter how many times I tell myself I can just get started anyway, it doesn’t happen).

So, new plan.

I want to finish a book, but since “finish the book” isn’t really working for me as a daily goal, today’s is simpler: write 3,000 words (which will probably finish the book). So many mind games. It’s hilarious. But whatever works!

I’ll do 20 minutes 4 times, take a break (or not, depending how I feel), then repeat this a few times. That will get me between 3–4 hours of writing. Which might be enough time to get to 3,000 words.

(I want to write about 90,000 words a month this year, which is insane for me, but I’m seriously tired of dragging out the time it takes to write all these books I want to write. If I really want to write them, I’m going to have to speed up! And there is absolutely no good reason why I can’t write that many words. I am not physically incapable of it, and I have enough ideas to last the rest of my life and beyond. Mental hangups just do not count as real limits. I can do it. Once I break through this barrier, it will get easier. I just have to keep pushing until I crack the wall.)

So, anyway, that’s the goal today. 3,000 words. I’ll report back at intervals, much like I used to do, and keep myself accountable to getting these 20 minute sessions in.

Update #1

I finished the first set. 694 words and 1.333 hours (20 x 4) and I came it at 521 words per hour overall, with one session short actual writing time of about 4 minutes because of a phone call interruption. So it could have been better but probably not by much.

I did a lot of backspacing. My typing is atrocious, but this was mostly me having trouble coming up with a next sentence issue.

I’m going to try to do better with the next one. Think for two seconds before I type or something, I don’t know.

I’m still planning for two to three more sets, but I’m going to have to have a break, which I will need to keep reasonably short. So good luck me with that.

Update #2

Finished the second set and ended up at 980 for the day. I threw in an extra five minutes on the timer so my numbers would round better. :) 2.75 hours, 980 words, 356 wph. Not gonna lie, I’m disappointed with the wph number. This was new material and shouldn’t have been so hard to get up to speed with.

Practicing

Lynn

I’m practicing writing more. By the new year, I want to get my week’s word count up to 16,800 and keep it there. It’s going to be hard to do with the holidays in the way, but I think it’s possible. I’ll probably have a few really good days and a few very low days, but it will all add up.

This is all because I’ve dumped using averages to tell me anything about my writing.

I took a hard look at all my numbers a while back and realized that the data I’ve collected is nothing but a series of outliers. Meaning averages don’t tell me anything useful about myself or my writing habits other than that sometimes I write a lot and sometimes I hardly write at all.

The thing that will be more useful to me than averages is a quota.

I had thought about sticking with a daily quota but it leaves more room for failure. It’s easy to miss a day here and there.

But if I use a weekly quota, it’s still short-term enough to keep me focused (I think, evidence still to be accumulated) but not as dependent on me having a good day every single day. (2,400 words a day every single day is a big ask for me. But some days with bigger word counts and some days with smaller word counts is more realistic.)

On the surface, this really isn’t any different than pushing for a daily average word count of something or other, but underneath, there’s a different mindset at play when trying to hit a weekly word count target versus trying to maintain a certainly daily word count.

Getting stuff out the door before Christmas and a new year’s goal

Lynn

Finished my story. Now on to publishing, writing an episode for the serial I’m doing on Kindle Vella, and finally getting back to editing those novel chapters. Trying to do it all today. Time will be short because of a family obligation but I’m going to try.

I wrote over 2,400 words yesterday. I will have to look at my spreadsheet and see when the last time is that I made it over 2,000.

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m trying to get my 7 day total up to 16,800 before the new year and keep it there. That’s a 2,400 words a day average, although I’m not talking in averages anymore since they really don’t fit my writing/work style.

Time to publish and move on

Lynn

Today I’m working on formatting a story to publish. Yes, it’s the one I was editing. As soon as it’s gone, I’m going to write.

I’m actually excited to get back to writing. I kind of wish I could justify dumping everything I already have going and just start fresh with it all, but I don’t think I’d be happy to do that in the end, so I’m going to just pick up where I left off on it all.

Plan is simple: over the next few weeks or as quickly as possible (because I want to join NANOWRIMO with a project I can make a fresh start on) I want to finish all my outstanding works in progress.

Here’s what I have to get through and the words I’ve already written:

WIP Novel #160,660
WIP Novel #216,344
WIP Novel #37,737
WIP Novel #42,801
WIP Novel #5 (Will start this fresh for NANO)3,459
WIP Novella #15,398
WIP Short Story #1 (Sequel to the story I’ve just edited, had no idea I’d already written so much for it)4,353

Now, there’s no way I can get through all those WIP novels before November. But I can possibly finish the first two. Then I’ll do the NANO thing, finish that one, then get the rest of these completed by the end of the year.

That’s the plan.

It’s time to write on fewer stories at one time

Lynn

I currently have ten stories in progress. The longest one is at 66,000+ words and the shortest is at 188. Overall, I have more than 107,000 words of unfinished stories waiting to be finished. This is the natural result of keeping multiple stories going at once.

I’ve been working on the premise that I should always be writing whatever seems the most interesting to me to keep my interest levels as high as possible. However, that presupposes that just pecking away at the current story wouldn’t trigger new interest when I finally hit on something that felt right for the story, and also presupposes that getting tied up in something else wouldn’t delay a return of interest for the original story. And as it stands, I can’t know the answer to that.

As much as keeping multiple stories going seems to help me write more when the writing isn’t going well, I can’t really know that for sure, primarily because when I started doing it my numbers were already falling and I was trying to prop them up in whatever way I could.

Even though 2019 was a big improvement over the two years before, my best annual word counts came in years when I was still writing only on one book at a time for the most part, and I haven’t beaten those numbers yet.

Now, I don’t know that this means anything. I’ve been in a weird transitional phase with my kids for several years now, because it’s their college years and only one seems to have settled a bit, and the other is home a lot and has a work schedule that is all over the place, but I thought it was worth a true experiment to find out if sticking to one thing at a time might be better for me in the long run.

This came about because I’m frustrated that I’ve lost interest in several of the stories I have in progress and I blame that on the fact that I feel like I’ve been working on some of these stories for far, far, far too long.

I just can’t hold interest in something that long. It’s starting to feel like it would be better not to even start the book at all if I’m not going to be able to devote myself to it and finish it within a reasonable span of time.

Something has to give, because to be frank, I’m losing interest in almost every story I write these days long before I make it to the end. I’m not used to that, and I don’t like it. If I can’t get that under control, I can’t improve my daily word counts and I can’t meet my goals.

 

Daily post – Jan. 22, 2020 – Wednesday

Lynn

Short night. Went to sleep at 3 am, woke up at 8 and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I’m up early.

Today I’m coming at my writing from the angle of no schedule at all. I haven’t decided if I’ll use a timer. I guess it depends on what happens when I sit down to write. :-)

I’m going to try for a large word count today because I want to get as close to the end of this book as I can get. I can’t honestly tell you if I’m getting close or not. But my last one was well over 100k words and I just do not want that for this book. So I’m holding out hope that my muse isn’t going to do that to me again. Maybe futilely. :D

Today I’m going to write, copy edit some early chapters, follow no schedule at all, maybe use timers, maybe not, finish my cover, finish my taxes, order a washing machine, and probably take a nap at some point!

Now, off to get this day started and I’ll update later.

And…

I wrote 210 words just to keep my streak alive thirty minutes before I went to bed. So, yeah, I’m writing this bit on Thursday morning. I tried something a little different yesterday, but it failed hard. :)

I’d call this project block, but what it really is is project boredom. ;-) My characters aren’t telling me what they want to do next and what they’re doing now is boring the hell out of me. :D

The good news is I feel a lot better today, so I think I’ll find the discipline to sit down and get my characters to make some decisions about what the hell it is they’re doing. ;-)

If they annoy me too much today, I’ll chop off the last two or three chapters and tell them they better rethink that last big decision! I’ll put the screws to them. If they want this story told, they better start talking. :D

 

Unthinking my writing plans and making adjustments

Lynn

So. I’m in a tough spot right now. I keep going over things in my head, trying to come up with some process that will help me get past my boredom to do the writing I need and want (but don’t want) to do. I want to do it, but I don’t want to sit down and do the work of it.

A conundrum, I know. It isn’t the sitting down, or the typing, that keeps me from getting started. It’s the expectation and the thinking I have to do.

My brain is just so tired of all this thinking.

So tonight, after another day of agonizing about not writing but never getting to the point where I could make myself sit down and write (I even canceled a doctors’ appointment today for this), I have finally come to the conclusion that I’m making this so much harder than it has to be.

I’m going to take a step back from all the various plans I’ve come up with in the last few weeks to try to get me moving on my books again, and just… go easy on myself.

The new plan is so simple I feel ridiculous even calling it a plan.

I’m going to write some fiction every day.

I’m going to try to write enough to keep me happy when I look at my daily and weekly and monthly word counts.

I’m going to focus on getting a streak of daily writing going.

That’s it, really. Just write, and stop thinking so much.

Too much thinking gets in the way of a lot of things. It can also set us on a path we don’t need to be on.

Day two of working the new mindset

Lynn

Today I’ve set aside two main blocks for writing. I’m posting here for the accountability. I’ll come back and fill in my progress later today when I have the time to spare. I’m doing it again today, because it turns out I do like this planning and working to the plan thing. :)

2:00–5:30 pm

7:15–9:45 pm

The goal today is 2,995 words. I’ll write a post later talking about the new mindset and what I’m attempting to do. Right now, it’s 1:59 pm and I have to get to work on today’s writing.

End of day word count: 794 words

Update:

I mostly adhered to the schedule, except I’m still finding it difficult to stay focused. That’s a thing with me, though, and I’m trying to do my best to keep myself on task by using a timer that runs when I’m actually writing. It’s simply a way to hold myself accountable for writing during the blocks of time I’m setting aside.

As usual, I’m not actively writing nearly as much as the time allotted would suggest I am. That’s also something I’m used to happening with time blocks, so we’ll see if it improves over time.

Chopped up writing day but a writing day it will be

Lynn

It’s going to be a chopped up day but writing can’t wait, so I’m setting aside several blocks of time. I’m posting here for the accountability. I’ll come back and fill in my progress later today when I have the time to spare. I think I’m going to like this planning and working to the plan thing. :)

10:15–11:15 am

I wrote 588 words during this block of time.

5:00–7:30 pm

I wasn’t even home yet. So this one didn’t work out.

9:00–10:30 pm

I was so dead tired I didn’t even bother looking at my computer. Two hours longer in the pool than I planned wiped me out.

I love swimming but I came home as wrinkled as a prune and more sunburned than I wanted. Luckily, I have skin than tans easily once I start getting a little sun, and I had been acclimating myself to the sun this year in an effort to raise my low Vitamin D levels and avoid the supplements my doctor wanted me to take for the next year.

(And I will say, today—I’m writing this update on Friday morning, the day after—I feel really good. The exercise and sun really did me a favor. :) Hopefully I’ll see the benefits in my writing stamina! I’d like to write a lot of words today. I’ll update with a link when Friday’s post goes live.)

Thursday words: 588

*I take my ending document word count and input it into my spreadsheet, which calculates the difference from the ending word count for the day before and tells me how many words I “wrote”, which of course, isn’t about how many words I wrote at all. It’s about how many words more my document contains today than it contained yesterday.

It’s by far the easiest way to track word counts and keeps me honest about the progress I’m making each day writing words that will end up published. :)

Screenshot of my word count tracker spreadsheet

As you can see in the screenshot of my spreadsheet, I’m currently trying to practice my way into writing 2,995 words a day.

I’m nowhere near close to that as a daily average, so don’t get goggly-eyed at it. I’m not there and who knows if I ever will be. I’d like to be, for reasons I won’t get into in this post, and that’s why that number is there. :)

Finally, those word count lengths in my spreadsheet for novel, novella, and novelette are my personal goals. The SFWA sets novels at 40,000+, novellas at 17,500+, and novelettes at 7,500+ words, and I use something very close to those definitions as my own guide when categorizing my stories. :)

Screenshot of the Nebula Award rules from the SFWA website

My length categorizations are only slightly different and at this point I can’t remember exactly why that is. :)

Novel > 40,000 words
Novella = 15,000 to 40,000 words
Novelette = 7,000 to 15,000 words
Short story < 7,000 words

In all honesty, I think it’s because I have more stories than not that fall at the upper edges of those word counts and I felt like they fit the category above more than they fit the category below so I adjusted the numbers to fit my writing style. :)

New plan because July needs rescued

Lynn

So July has been a terrible month for writing, but I haven’t given up on rescuing it yet. Starting tomorrow I’m going to just plow into my most appealing current story in progress and try to pick up some momentum.

The plan is simple. Start writing and don’t stop until I’m done, or 4 pm.

The 4 pm thing might seem like a cop out, but I know if I don’t allow myself a break at some point if the writing isn’t going well, I’ll give up completely. So 4 pm is my fail safe.

If I’m doing my best and I can’t seem to get up any momentum and can’t reach my word count goal (of 2,995 words, reasons for which I don’t want to get into in this supposed-to-be-short post right before bed) then I’m allowed to quit at 4 pm for a longish break and make another run at it later in the evening.

If I’m not doing my best to write and do nothing but write until I reach my word count goal, then the experiment failed anyway so none of this will matter. :-o

I’ll update this post after the fact and let you know how it went.

Update: It did not go well. I tried again the next day and it didn’t go well either. I’m currently trying again and it is going better today. A little. But I’m not giving up on this just yet. I’m in the midst of a mindset change and that can take a bit of time.

July 8, 2018 Sunday writing

Lynn

It’s 9:18 in the morning and I’m going to start today’s writing soon. I prefer to write every day, so Sunday is no day off for me. I’ve tried taking weekends off, but I just do not do well when I change up my routine. I’m much better at sticking to something if I don’t allow myself to ever skip a day.

My current philosophy: write every day!

So here I am, ready to write. I was trying to stick to 12–4 as my writing time, and I do plan to go back to that, but right now, I’m falling so far behind where I want to be with my current book in progress that I’m trying every day to start a little earlier than that.

The plan today: write in 60 minute sessions to limit breaks and distractions. I would like to write at least 4,000 words today but I’m not setting that as a goal. I’ll be satisfied if I just write as much as I can during the 6 sessions I have planned.

So really, my goal is to write for 6 hours today. And a subgoal of that is to focus on writing as fast as I can during those sessions.

9:22 – I’m going to grab breakfast, make coffee, feed the stray cat and her brood, and sit down to start my first timer. I hope this doesn’t take too long. I’d like to be writing before 10 am.

10:40 – I’m starting a little later than I wanted but the first timer session is ready to go!

I’ll probably do my updates in OneNote and post them here after the fact. I do happen to find the internet very distracting.

12:30 – Finished first session. 259 words.

12:51 – Ready to start session two. Try not to judge so hard and write more freely. The story isn’t going to fall apart if I have a little fun.

1:13 – I got distracted after all. I’m trying to find a new launcher for my phone and I spent a few minutes looking at those in Play and sending them to my phone. But I’m ignoring my phone for now and getting started with this second session instead.

3:32 – Stopped to pre-prep lunch/dinner and ended up working on my spreadsheets instead of finishing my second 60 minute session. I have 23 minutes left, but it looks like I won’t be getting back to it until after this meal.

Time is really getting away from me.

5:25 – I’m ready to get back to writing now. Time to finish that last 23 minutes, then start another session right away if I can.

6:02 – And there I went again. I spent some more time working on my spreadsheet, running various numbers. I think I’ve decided pretty definitively (sure sounds like it, huh?) that I’m going to try again to start averaging 2,000 words a day. Not just as an average though, but as a “more days than not” thing.

I have books I want to write, sooner rather than later, and I’m just not writing them as fast as I want to. I mean that. I want to write these books sooner than I’ll ever be able to write most of them if I don’t improve my daily average. Not to say that I wouldn’t appreciate an increase in income, but I really want to write these books and other books, and more books, and just… I want to be prolific as a writer. Don’t ask me why. I don’t really know, and even though I’ve thought of a thousand reasons why it might be, none of those reasons feel right to me. I just know I want to do this. I want to be prolific.

And there’s a reason 2,000 words a day feels prolific to me.

2,000 words a day gets me 730,000 words a year, and that’s 14 books of about 52,000 words each. Some could be shorter, some longer. The actual average for all my novels is 60,844 words. But even at 60,000 words for every book I were to write, 2,000 words a day would still allow me to write 12 books a year.

At 12 books a year, I would get through all the books I’d like to write in about 3 years.

That’s where I’d like to be.

2,000 words a day.

Now I’m going to have to make today the first of many 2,000 word days. Anything less will be a joke on me. :)

6:14 – Time to finish that second hour long session.

6:54 – Finished session two, finally. 332 words. 591 words total.

7:11 – Ready to start session three. But first, a quick game of solitaire.

7:18 – I won! Okay, time to get busy now. I’m really going to try to write more words this time. I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m going for at least 1,000 words in this hour. It’ll be a freaking miracle if I reach it, but I want to try.

8:16 – A few small interruptions mean I have 10 minutes left on the timer even though it’s been an hour since I started this session. I’m not sure why I stopped, but I’m having a lot of trouble concentrating. It felt like I didn’t have a choice but to take a quick break. It’s also obvious that I’m going to come up far short of the 1,000 words I wanted for this session. However, at least I’ve been writing and I do have some words to show for it—and some forward progress in the story. Ugh. I need to get back to those 10 minutes. Okay, okay. I’m going.

10:55 – I did not get back to those 10 minutes. Honestly, I’m just going to have to remember today tomorrow, and try not to make the same mistakes. I started a little too late, I didn’t stay focused and ended up sitting at the computer much too long doing unimportant things unrelated to writing, and that tired me out before I needed to be tired out.

Anyway, I’m calling today done. I added 1,053 words to my novel today.

Disappointed with my progress this last two weeks

Lynn

I’ve had a couple of bad weeks of writing and I’m anxious to stop the downward slide. It’s 1:34 in the morning and I’ve spent another evening doing everything I can to avoid getting started with writing. It’ll continue until I decide to put a stop to it. So that’s what I’m doing. Tomorrow, I’ll write. 3 hours minimum. 1,557 words at least. And then a little more just to prove that I control my own actions. I don’t have to end the day disappointed in myself.

Funnily enough I feel good about writing today

Lynn

After last night’s contemplative mood, I’m surprised by how well I feel today, about writing, about the future, about everything.

Well, except for the spider infestation I seem to be dealing with. Not so happy about that! But they’re little spiders, with feathery legs, and those kind don’t trigger my phobia the way most other spiders do.

Still, not that happy that one landed on my bed last night and started trucking it right up beside my leg. I couldn’t find any sign of where it came from, but I’ll be vacuuming my bedroom ceiling today regardless. Then of course I came down to find one tucked up in the corner over the breakfast room window and another in the corner of the hallway that leads to the garage. I vacuumed those ceilings just a couple of days ago. Let me just say, as a five foot one person with nine foot high ceilings, this has been a chore and a half! My bedroom has a tray ceiling and the middle section is ten foot high. That’s going to be fun.

So, on that note, I’d like to finish my writing before I have to go up and start vacuuming ceilings again. I figure when I’m done, all I’m going to want to do is crash on the couch and read a book!

Okay, on to today’s plan. I’m going to go with 45 minute blocks, because they divide evenly into 3 hours. I’m planning four of them.

I decided last night after some vague contemplation (I wasn’t forcing these thoughts) that 3 hours a day even if I reach 1,557 words earlier isn’t a bad expectation. I see no reason why I wouldn’t want to write for at least that long most days. So although I haven’t decided it’s a rule or anything, I think aiming for a complete 3 hours each day of writing isn’t asking too much of myself. Preferably I’ll do this in the mornings, but on days when I don’t, I’ll try not to stretch out my day to the point that I’m finishing an hour of writing at bedtime. Some authors do well writing late at night. I don’t. I give up much too easily when I’m tired. So I have to stop putting myself in that position.

Write early, write more later if I want.

Now to go write.

Start trying to reach minimum by noon

Lynn

The title is brought to you by my plan. :) Starting today (It’s only 9:05 a.m.!) I want to try to finish my minimum by noon each day. By finishing early, I’ll take a lot of the pressure off and be able to enjoy writing in the afternoons when I do it, read fiction and craft books, watch and work through design tutorials, and actually maybe get some of the stuff that I’ve had on the back burner done.

Writing is an important part of my life, but I really don’t want to let it become the be-all and end-all of what I do. I am a publisher too, and I do want to have and maintain hobbies that aren’t also writing (writing fan fiction is a hobby which I really miss some days, but it’s still writing).

On that note, I don’t want to spend all morning writing this post and then wondering why I didn’t have enough time to write 1,557 words before noon.

I’ll post once I reach 1,557 words with my end time and time to completion and all the other usual stats. :)

I’m estimating (pushing for) 623 wph and 2.5 hours of timed writing. :D

If you’re a writer, have a good day of writing! If you’re not, read something today and enjoy it. :)

A plan for the future

Lynn

I’m tired of lowercase titles. And yet, I continue to use them. :)

Today I have a plan.

20 minute blocks x 12 of them @ ~750 words an hour = 3,000 words

Yep. That’s my plan.

In fact, it’s my plan for every day for the indefinite future. I’ve been giving some thought to the need for change and some direction for the rest of my year. Those thoughts led me to realize I need to expect more from myself; it’s the only way to grow. I don’t want to be stagnant. A moribund life is not the life I want, despite the fact that my brain is all about strolling down easy street.

I made a note to myself last night. It’s important.

Write for fun! Do more than that though. Make time for other stuff. Don’t drag it out.

I need to write with focus. I need to focus on writing. I need to meet my goals early so I can do other things. Then as a reward, if I want, I can write more later. But always, I need to remember that the only way to meet my goals is to actually prioritize writing and do it first. I get to do it first and save all the stuff in my life that I don’t really want to do for later.

What I’ve typically done, though, is dawdle until I feel pressured to do these other things at the expense of what little time I’ve left myself for writing, because there are immediate consequences if I don’t. (Bills! Dishes! Laundry! Talking to relatives and friends! All of these have consequences for me that I’m not willing to accept if I don’t do them.)

I’ve always felt as if writing daily is a priority, and therefore I feel all the guilt one feels when one doesn’t do that important thing one should have done, but when it comes down to it, I haven’t treated it that way at all.

That’s the big thing I need to change about myself. That’s what I’m going to be focused on changing.

Write in the morning

Reach my word count goal

Or at least do the number of sessions I’ve decided I should be doing at a minimum each day

Then worry about the rest of life and whatever I want to do with my time after that, even if it’s just more writing

Simple. :D