Tag: Session logs

Posts with writing session details: time, words, progress, etc.

Breakfast musings

Lynn

To prevent myself from continuing the patterns that have led to me writing less than I want over the last two weeks, I’m writing this post while I have breakfast. :D Usually I read during that time, but that reading has been leading me to put off writing much longer than I should each day. I finished reading a book yesterday and started another, and I’m now halfway through that one too. So no more reading, at least until I get some more writing done.

I did write yesterday, but my word count only reached 207 words for 2.25 hours of writing, mostly because I went back to chapter 9 and started making my way forward through the book. I haven’t made it very far because I was trying to figure out why I didn’t like some of what was there. I think I fixed it, but I still have to make it through another 7 chapters before I’m free to write all new material. :)

I will say I haven’t gotten off to a great start today. I started this post sometime around 11 this morning, and because of letting myself get sidetracked, I’m just now finishing it and it’s 2:37.

I’ll have to spend the rest of the day writing if I want to end up with an appreciable number of words. I’d like at least 6 hours of timed writing today, and I’d like to not stay up until 2 am to get them.

I’m thinking I might try a challenge, but I won’t decide for sure until after I finish the read-through edits and get to the new material.

8-10-17 Thursday

Lynn

Getting lazy on titles today. :)

The plan is 3 hours and 1,557 words. I’m going to read for a few minutes and then get started. Somehow it’s already 12:58 pm and I have no idea how that happened.

Okay, I’ve procrastinated like nobody’s business today, so I’m going to have to nail this word count today in record time or it’s not going to get done. Needless to say (I’m saying it anyway), it needs to get done.

Holy crap.

Would you believe I’m still procrastinating? :o

All is not lost. I did actually work on my timeline for this book (it’s a mess) and brainstorm a bit. That counts, right? It did get me 138 words.

Sadly, they’re mostly just notes-to-self so I don’t forget some of the stuff I figured out and they’ll be deleted as soon as I don’t need them anymore.

Updates

54 minutes, 141 words.

Total words: 279.

Well, not great, but it’s something, right?

Will have to do better tomorrow.

Practicing longer session lengths today

Lynn

Writing longer is a problem I need to tackle. So today I am writing in one hour blocks. Practice is the key to improvement, right? So practice I will!

Also, I might reach a higher wph with a shorter session but I have a real problem doing a great many sessions. At least with the one hour blocks, even if I just finish one, I’m almost guaranteed to have a few more words than I’ll get from fifteen minutes. ;)

On that note, though, I am planning to do three of them, for three hours of timed writing today, minimum. As long as I reach 519 wph, I’ll reach 1,557 words. I have stuff to do today that isn’t writing, so I also want to finish those three hours relatively early. Relative, because it’s already 11:20 and I’m just about to have breakfast.

Yes, I did stay up too late, and I don’t have any writing to show for it. Kind of sad, huh?

Update

Well, I didn’t write. I started reading a book and it was good, and I just never got started writing. Then I had things to do and came home tired. I would have gone to bed early but the spider infestation made itself known again (another spider tried to crawl up my bed—the third one in four days!) and I started vacuuming ceilings at 10:30 and finished at about midnight. Really shouldn’t have procrastinated that the night before. :o After that I had to take a shower because I was ridiculously hot and sweaty. Got in bed at 1 a.m. All I can say is that if they’re using old webs to travel the skies, the spiders are going to have to build some new ones. Maybe I’ll get a few days of peace out of that. This is the problem with living in the middle of the woods on a mountain. Ortho can’t save you, unfortunately. Spiders are everywhere. I hate spiders.

Today’s goal: 3 hours and 1,557 words

Lynn

So today I’m going back to talking about goals. Mostly because I’m tired of trying to find ways to phrase things so that I don’t use the word goal. It’s just a word, and giving it too much power probably isn’t helping me. I honestly don’t care if I reach it every day. It’s just something to aim at and a place to stop if I get there early and want to take advantage of that. :)

Session 1: 45 minutes, 351 words

Session 2: in progress

The next morning update: Never made it through session 2. Just one of those days.

Still working on those words

Lynn

As the title says, I’m still working on those 1,557 words today.

The good news? I had a speed breakthrough—now that I’m not stressing over speed, of course.

The bad news? It’s 7:59 and yes, it took me that long to get another 25 minutes of writing, and no, I haven’t been able to stay away from the internet AT ALL.

Still, I’m pretty psyched that my spreadsheet says I need only another 0.774038462 hours to finish my words at my current speed.

I switched from a 45 minute session (that I ended up doing in a 29 minute and 16 minute block many hours apart) to 25 minute sessions, as you can see in the table below.

Mins. Words WPH WPM
29 346 716 11.9
16 156 585 9.8
25 434 1,042 17.4

Now, it’s back to writing for me. I do not want to end today without those words.

And the next day… I wrote 1,334 words. At midnight, I gave up. My pace dropped to 552 wph average because of a few bad sessions so it took a lot longer to get there than I wanted it to.

Using the stopwatch instead of the timer—and epiphanies

Lynn

So today I’m writing with my little timer software set to the stopwatch instead of the timer. I’ve started each session with the intention of writing until something distracts me. Surprisingly, my session lengths have been pretty regular.

This is an experiment, really, because I’ve tried straight-up timing my sessions before (versus using the timer to limit session length) and I didn’t have much luck with it. It was time to give it another try, and I’m pleased with how it’s working out.

Session 1

30 minutes. 384 words. 768 wph. I stopped because my phone dinged with a message in Hangouts.

Session 2

36 minutes. 214 words. 357 wph. Too much cycling and editing of session 1 words.

Session 3

25 minutes. 98 words. 235 wph. Way too much editing of the words from sessions 1 and 2.

Session 4

20 minutes. 106 words. 318 wph. I stopped because I’ve been drinking too much tea this morning and I had no choice. :D

Sessions 5–7

43 minutes. 399 words. 557 wph. Frustration with my plot stopped me this time. I had to have a break or I was going to break something. :D

35 minutes. 281 words. 489 wph. More plot frustrations!

16 minutes. 212 words. 795 wph. Stopped by the phone ding again.

I’ve reached my day’s minimum word count.

It should not have taken me all day to do 3.4 hours of writing, but it really did. I made a note of the start time in my journal, and it was 11:19 am. I ended session 7 at 6:52 pm. So for 3.4 hours of writing, I used about 7.5 hours of the day. I wrote out a (ridiculously) long summary of where my time went and it made me realize my expectations of how much actual, focused time I can get out of 7.5 hours in the middle of the day might be unrealistic.

Getting my expectations in line with reality might go a long way toward keeping me from coming up with ridiculous plans for myself that I have no hope of following through on. Grandiose plans, I think that book The 7 Secrets of the Prolific called them. (It was a good book, if you haven’t read it.)

Yes, I make grandiose plans. I use math to support those plans, and I never build in the time I need for writing these posts, making my notes by hand, or anything else that probably uses up significant chunks of untracked time.*

I’d like to come up with some ideas of how I can stop that from happening, but the only things coming to mind are things I’ve tried a thousand times before and found completely ineffective. And I’m not willing to make myself stop these posts. Although I should probably give some serious thought to trimming them down to basics. I ramble. A lot. And talk about stuff that doesn’t really matter. Mostly because I think better when I’m writing things out, and it’s also easier for me to remember things I’ve written out.

Anyway, I should end this post, because I’ve actually been at it since (*holy shit) 9:04 pm and it’s now 10:04. There you go, an answer to the question of what happens to all that time I lose during the day when I’m writing.

These posts really do use up significant chunks of time. This could explain why my best month ever of writing consistently was February 2013, where there’s a distinct lack of posts here on this blog (as in, none) because I wouldn’t let myself get online before I’d finished my day’s writing and by the time I was done, I just didn’t want to write anymore. (See this lone March 2013 post for February’s numbers. Ignore the rest of the post for the sake of my pride. :D)

Anyway, I now have more to think about than ever. It’s starting to look like the more I write here, the less I write there, and that’s not a good thing at all. In a sense, I’m using up my writing energy writing everything except my books.

I need new habits that prioritize my fiction writing. So tomorrow I’m going to start a little experiment. No more wordy blog posts for a while, and not even an unwordy one unless I’ve finished my day’s writing. I’ll give it a while (a week, maybe two) and see if it makes any difference, good or bad.

Session totals

  1. 384
  2. 214
  3. 98
  4. 106
  5. 399
  6. 281
  7. 212
  • 1,694 words
  • in 3.4 hours
  • for a pace of 498 wph

In fact, looking at this post now, it’s 724 words long! Seriously, ugh.

Maybe I can get into flow and stay there

Lynn

The title was a note to myself from my notebook about trying 60 minute sessions (yesterday). :)

Session 1

I wrote 535 words, which means I’m on track to finish today’s minimum word count in less than 3 hours of timed writing. Yay! I have 1,022 words to go. :)

Session 2

I wrote 380 words, bringing my pace down to 458 words an hour. :(

Also, I am not loving these 60 minute sessions. I thought I’d give them another shot today, but I’m done. The next session will not be 60 minutes. They’re just not working for me and I don’t want to sabotage the rest of the night’s writing. (Because, yes, somehow it became 6:49 pm while I wasn’t looking.)

I have 642 words left to write and it’ll take an estimated 1.40 hours to do it.

Session 3

Despite saying otherwise, this session was 60 minutes long. I wrote even fewer words this time than last—only 313 words.

I moved to the living room and did them on the couch, and although it’s helping me relax more, it’s not helping my writing! I just can’t get comfortable today for writing. {ugghhhh}

A lot of my problem is caused by a side-effect of that home maintenance project I did on Monday and Tuesday. I am terribly allergic to mosquito bites. And I have what feels like a bazillion of them, courtesy of that stupid project. And the itching is driving me up the wall. Feels like I’ve been in contact with poison ivy! If I’d thought for a moment mosquitoes were going to be a problem I’d have hosed myself down in insect repellent but it never even occurred to me to worry about mosquitoes.

Anyway, better get busy with those last 329 words I need. It’s 10:29 and I’ve committed to ending my writing days at the stroke of midnight. I might sometimes keep writing, but anything after 12:00 pm sharp will not go into the previous day’s count.

If I want to reach my minimum for today, I only have 1.5 hours to do it.

Sessions 4–6

I finally abandoned the 60 minute sessions. These sessions were 20, 20, and 13 minutes long. I wrote 400 words exactly for a total of 1,628 words today.

Which, whew, because I really wanted to finish my minimum word count for the day. :D

Session totals

  1. 535
  2. 380
  3. 313
  4. 67
  5. 217
  6. 116

Sessions 1–3 were 60 minutes, and sessions 4–5 were 20 minutes, while session 6 was 13 minutes.

  • 1,628 total words
  • in 3.883 hours
  • for a pace of 419 words per hour

The hell if I know why that number of hours took me all day, but that’s pretty much how it is the majority of the time, so I guess I should quit being surprised by this.

See you back here tomorrow.

“What’s this?”

Lynn

Today’s title is brought to you by my journal and is nothing more than a note to myself of a line of dialogue so I’ll remember to add in something important that I appear to have forgotten about in yesterday’s work. :D

Session 1

So today I’m trying longer sessions. I’m in a position here in the dining room that makes it more likely they’ll work for me. I’m doing 60 minutes at a time, and I’m a little disappointed at my first session results of 327 words.

The low count could have been because of the scene I’m working through, or it could be that I end up slowing down with longer sessions. I don’t know. I felt like my mind wasn’t wandering, and that the writing sped up and slowed down in normal patterns, so who knows what it was. I’m going to let it ride for the moment.

I have 1,230 words left to write, and my spreadsheet says I’ll have to write for 3.76 more hours to do it at my current pace. (327 words an hour isn’t very fast!)

Session 2

I wrote 462 words in 60 minutes, bringing my pace up to 395 words an hour. So I’m still seriously under-performing, but maybe it’s just because I’ve been away from writing for so long.

It’s also much later in the day at this point than I wanted it to be. However, my spreadsheet now says I need only 1.95 more hours of writing to reach 1,557 words today and I know I can do that.

In the 117 days prior to the restart of this book, I wrote only 2,115 words of fiction in total. That’s almost 4 months of nada. It makes sense that I need to get myself back up to speed.

Anyway, back to it. I have 768 words left to write and after a break I’m going to do my damnedest to write them all in the next session!

Session 3

Well, this sucks. I’m exhausted (and in pain) from the project I started during my break between sessions. I wrote 146 words in 33 minutes, realized it was after midnight, and decided to call it.

I would’ve had time to finish this if that project hadn’t taken 3 hours instead of the 30 minutes I estimated (moving furniture, a computer, etc). Then I had to help out one of my kids with something and listen to said kid talk for nearly an hour about stuff he really should have talked to me about when I was on a break.

What this session made me realize was that I need a cutoff time. Midnight seems perfectly appropriate, so tonight and in the future, if I haven’t finished my words by midnight, I haven’t finished my words for the day.

It’s better this way. Otherwise I’ll guilt myself into staying up super late trying to finish and the next day will suffer.

Anyway, I’m disappointed in myself for not finishing these words tonight. No more big projects as breaks when I’m writing.

  1. 327
  2. 462
  3. 146 (not a full session)
  • 935 words
  • in 2.44 hours
  • for a pace of 368 wph

Knife is in which boot?

Lynn

Sessions 4–5

These two sessions dragged down my pace, which is a bummer, because I’d really wanted to pull off a miracle, write faster than I’ve written all day, and finish my minimum words in the three hours I should be able to finish them. Didn’t happen.

I wrote 252 words in session 4 and only 154 words in session 5. My pace is now 378 words an hour today. Which is way below average.

So I’ll be doing more sessions. But first, dinner. All this brain work has made me hungry. ;)

Oh, and that title? Straight off the notebook page open beside me. I have no idea what’s going on in this book but I really need to figure it out soon. ;D

Session 6

So slow! I’m really dragging here. I don’t feel draggy, just the words aren’t coming easily and the plot is dragging me down. I think when I go back I’m going to move on whether my characters are ready or not because I sure am. I’m ready for some action! ;D

This one got me only 127 words closer to my minimum and knocked my pace down to 350 words an hour. Which stinks. Like a skunk.

I’m really going to have to push for this one to be the last because I don’t want to stay up late tonight for this.

Session 7

I wrote 274 words in 36 minutes and my pace is now 365 words an hour.

There’s not a lot else to say. My total is up to 1534 now and I’m going to write just a few more minutes to get to my daily minimum and then I’m calling it done. :D

Session totals

  1. 247
  2. 144
  3. 336
  4. 252
  5. 154
  6. 127
  7. 274
  8. 48 (not a full session)
  • 1,582 total words
  • in 4.4 hours
  • for a pace of 360 words per hour

You know what’s funny? I found it easier to go past 4 hours today, aiming for this smaller number of words, than it has been any of the times I’ve been aiming for 3,000.

Final sessions for the day

Lynn

I finished up the last of my sessions. I had hoped to reached 3,000 words but I didn’t quite make it. I’m at 2,332 for the day. I might come back later and do some more writing, because I really want to end the day at 3,000 words!

But for now, I need a break. A massive break, because my brain is tired. :D

  • Session 6 = 425 words (850 wph)
  • Session 7 = 236 words (472 wph)
  • Session 8 = 209 words (418 wph)

Totals for the day

2,332 words and 583 wph

Eight sessions instead of twelve seems to be the way to go

Lynn

Eight sessions instead of twelve seems to be the way to go! Of course, I made up the total time difference by making the eight sessions thirty minutes long instead of twenty. But it has left me fewer opportunities for distraction and here it is 11:56 a.m. and I have only three sessions to go. :)

  • Session 1 = 302 words (604 wph)
  • Session 2 = 263 words (526 wph)
  • Session 3 = 270 words (540 wph)
  • Session 4 = 312 words (624 wph)
  • Session 5 = 315 words (630 wph)

Sessions are 30 minutes long. Goal is 375 words per session, 750 words per hour.

Not there yet, but getting closer!

Total so far = 1,462 words

Nope—didn’t make it

Lynn

I’m calling it a night at 1,531 and about 3 hours. I’ve done a little more than that but totally lost track because I started adding things to the story without the timer going. So who knows the actual time spent today, but I didn’t make enough progress on my word count to worry over it.

Bringing my total for today to 1,531 words.

Tomorrow I’ll try the 30 minute sessions x 8 of them and see how that does for me. See you then. :)

A new month and a fresh start

Lynn

I’ll take whatever opportunity I can find for a fresh start. My word counts haven’t been where I want them the last few days, nor even before that but at least then I had enough time invested that I didn’t feel like a slacker, but today is the first of a new month and I plan to use that to push for my goal word count of 3,000 words.

So far, I’m on track I’m happy to say. Especially since I can’t ever tell if I’m going to write fast or slow during any one session until I’m actually writing.

Sessions are 20 minutes, goal is 250 words per session or 750 wph.

  • Session 1 = 349 words
  • Session 2 = 281 words
  • Session 3 = 247 words

Total for 1 hour = 877 words

Pace = 877 wph

Yay!

I’m going to try out a new format for blogging today. I’ll start with these smaller posts about my progress and then do a summary post at the end of the day.  I just kind of like things in little packets. ;)

 

 

You think you got this and then you don’t do the work

Lynn

That title there? Basically the exact thing that’s happened today. I was sure I was on track after having two successful days of writing—successful in that I sat myself down and managed to write for four complete hours each day, even if it took me much longer than I’d have liked. But then today came and I let myself slip up.

I’ve done four sessions of the twelve I need to do to reach that same four hour goal and it’s already 7:45 pm.

To finish my 8 remaining sessions by a reasonable hour (say, 11 pm) I’ll need to do as many of the remaining sessions back-to-back as I can, and that’s just the truth. Because here’s the thing. I am accountable to me and I’m not going to let myself get away with not doing the work.

Not today. Not tomorrow. Not anytime soon.

I’ve said it before: To be the kind of writer I want to be, I need to change.

Missing a goal once in a while is no big deal and doesn’t feel anything like failure. Missing a goal every single time is not a good thing. There are repercussions to that kind of repetitive failure. I’m done with that. I just can’t be that person, that kind of writer, any longer.

If I miss today’s goal, it will be a 1:3 failure rate. That’s no longer good enough for me. I’ve set my boundaries and 1:3 ain’t it.

But I’m lucky, because this day isn’t over and there’s no reason to accept failure.

Getting back on track is as easy as saying it’s time to start writing again.

(I originally started a new post for today’s session log but I changed my mind and I’ve moved it here instead.)

Daily Accountability

Session 1: 307 words
Session 2: 217 words
Session 3: 48 words
Session 4: 20 words

Sessions are 20 minutes long and my goal for each is 250 words. Not there yet. Working on it. :)

Next day update: Well, shit. I didn’t do any more sessions. I had good reasons, but if I’d done my writing early like I should’ve done, this would not have happened.

1,063 words and time ended 7:13 pm

Lynn

Today was better than yesterday and that’s good enough for me!

DAILY ACCOUNTABILITY

Session 1 : 234 words
Session 2 : 92 words
Session 3 : 174 words
Session 4 : 244 words
Session 5 : 46 words
Session 6 : 177 words
Session 7 : 7 words
Session 8 : 80 words
Session 9 : 8 words
Session 10 : 149 words
Session 11 : -320 words
Session 12 : 172 words

For 1,063 total words.

As with yesterday, all sessions were 20 minutes.

I’m not surprised it’s taking a while to relearn how to focus on writing. Focus in quantity has always been difficult for me. I do seem to have episodes of hyperfocus, but to be honest, they almost always accompany things like reorganizing my file system or troubleshooting a problem I want fixed right now.

One thing I have noticed: It’s funny how often I don’t notice my bladder problems until I sit down to write and end up with my sessions constantly interrupted.

Removed duplicate text

Lynn

I followed up on last night’s plan to do at least half of the minimum number of writing sessions before I allowed myself any internet access. I did six!

DAILY ACCOUNTABILITY

Session 1 (20 min): 119 words
Session 2 (20 min): 37 words
Session 3 (20 min): 103 words
Session 4 (20 min): 2 words
Session 5 (20 min): 98 words
Session 6 (20 min): -240 words
Session 7 (20 min): 71 words
Session 8 (20 min): 26 words
Session 9 (20 min): 128 words
Session 10 (20 min): 69 words
Session 11 (20 min): 96 words
Session 12 (20 min): 185 words — Of course this was my highest word count of the day. And I’m too tired to keep it up because it’s 11:58 pm and I need sleep!

My aim for all these is 250 words each. So yeah, I’m a little off the mark.

Today’s blog post title is from a note to myself on the last session I did before I broke for lunch.

The note refers to the fact that I found a 332 word chunk of text that I needed to delete, half of it a portion of a scene I copied instead of moved to an earlier place in the story. I must have forgotten to delete it after the fact, but I usually just move the text, so I’m not sure what I was thinking when I did it.

The exciting thing is that to end up at -24 words, I had to have written more than my 250 words in that last session so here’s hoping I can keep that up now that I’m back from my late (2 pm) lunch.

Well, that’s a bummer. I realized after the fact, once I’d finished session 7 that -24 was a misprint. I should have written -240!

It’s been proven a sad fact that four hours of writing takes me all day and I have no idea why or how that happens. Writing everything down doesn’t even seem to help. I can find the big things; it’s the little bits of time that just seem to disappear.

11:23 pm and too few words again today

Lynn

I’ve managed only 2 of my 12 sessions today (20 minutes each). Part of the blame goes to my panic at realizing I had ruined the opening of my book by overworking it. I had to pull up backup copy 9 to get the old opening back. I’m currently at backup copy 20, and backup copy 9 was made on 6/11 (today is 6/24).

This all came to my attention last night when I sent my document to my Fire and read through what I’d written. My first thought was uh oh. So I pulled up the old version that I just happened to have sent to my Fire a while back and read the opening of it.

The old version was much better than the new. Miles better. Leagues better.

I was not happy to realize this.

I got up this morning knowing I’d have to fix it.  I’ve obsessed over things I didn’t need to obsess over today in an effort to avoid thinking about this.

I did a “compare documents” in Word to see just how bad it was. It was bad. More red than black, and ouch, I didn’t really need to see that.

It’s 11:59 pm and I should really go to bed, but I think I’m going to try to do a few more sessions so I don’t have this hanging over my head tomorrow. Then again… it’s late and I just want to put this day behind me, so maybe I won’t.

As for tomorrow, I think I’m going to forbid the internet until I’ve done at least half my minimum sessions. That’s only 6 and at 20 minutes each, comes to only 2 hours. I can surely hold out that long!

Now, time to get out of my own way and write this damn book without agonizing over every word. :D

DAILY ACCOUNTABILITY

Session 1 (20 min): -25 words (meaning I deleted more than I wrote)
Session 2 (20 min): 8 words

June 23 session notes

Lynn

So today hasn’t been the kind of writing day I’d hoped.

At the end of session 5, I am sitting at 12 words for the day. It hardly seems possible but the problem is that I spent so much time reworking what I had for chapters 1 and 2 that I went through four sessions before I dug myself out of negative numbers (I deleted more than I wrote).

Then I left for a while. I stayed gone longer than I meant to but I needed to get away for a while, because I was starting to hate this story.

Prioritizing my daily writing is a commitment to myself I need to keep, so I can’t let this happen again tomorrow. But tomorrow I hope to be up and about earlier after a good night’s sleep. I definitely won’t be staying up until the early morning hours tonight.

1 hour and 40 minutes of writing today isn’t great, but it’s a start.

I’d stay up and do the rest of the sessions if I didn’t need so badly to get my sleep patterns back into some kind of order so I can start early each day.

As much as I hate to admit it, because I do like staying up late, I am a morning person. I wake up before 7 most mornings and staying up until 2 am just doesn’t give me the kind of sleep I need to be at my best the next day, even if I manage to go back to sleep. It’s never truly restful once I’ve woken up to the sun.

So that’s the update for today.

Sessions logs are below.

Session

Words

WPH

1

-87

-261

2

2

6

3

9

27

4

12

36

5

76

228

Too much time reading for clues

Lynn

The blog post titles are a lot easier to come up with now, and they aren’t any more obscure than they were before, so that’s a win. :)

Today’s word counts

Session # Words WPH
1 46 131
2 84 240
3 32 91
4 99 283
5 57 163
6 61 174
7 166 474
8 239 683
9  72 206
10 0

Today’s title comes from a note on my session log. In it, I’m laying the blame for my low word counts in my first three sessions on the fact that I spent a lot of time during them reading through my previous books looking for clues to characterization and plot.

Yes, that’s my handwriting. Could be better, but it is what it is! :)

Unfortunately, my word counts didn’t improve a lot after I stopped doing that.

I don’t record session logs in my spreadsheet—there’s really no room for it—so writing them down seems like a good way to start paying attention to just how often I’m meeting my goal number of sessions.

I could put them in OneNote, and I have in the past kept up with sessions in my journals, but I really don’t like that. Also, the logs get kind of lost in the midst of all my ramblings, so… this seemed like something I wanted to try.

I’ve devoted one of my favorite notebooks to tracking them and I’m loving how accountable it makes me feel to write down the number of sessions I want to do. I can’t stand the idea of wasting that nice paper, so I’ve felt compelled to fill those slots today! Only two more to go before I call it a day.

Also, yesterday I didn’t find time to write a post because I actually got started writing really late and didn’t use timers. I wrote 813 words yesterday—on the wrong book.

Okay, so I’m planning to write that book next, so it’s not exactly wrong that I spent time on it, and I admit, I’ve needed a breakthrough for the opening of that book for a good long while and I had one last night, but I really need to finish this other book first so I do feel a little unhappy that I managed to write 813 words but that none of them were for the right book!

4:52 pm and a 2,800 word goal

Lynn

Today started off well enough. I finished organizing (cleaning out) my music directory. Doing that was a better use of my time than (re)organizing my email again, but that’s not possible any more because sometime last month I deleted all my email. I saved a few particular pieces of interest to a few relevant folders and I absolutely did delete thousands of emails. They’ll never be seen again. I kept only one backup, stored in an inaccessible location, with the intent to delete it at year’s end. I don’t doubt that I will too.

But that’s all beside the point. The point is that I need to write some real words today and I’m really getting tired of failing.

So I’m not going to fail anymore.

Missing a goal once in a while is no big deal and doesn’t feel anything like failure. Missing a goal every single time is not a good thing. There are repercussions to that kind of repetitive failure. I’m done with that. I just can’t be that person, that kind of writer, any longer.

So, despite the fact that it is now 4:59 pm, I’m going to sit my ass down and I’m going to write 2,800 words this evening.

To make it easy, I’m going to break it down into 21 minute sessions. I’ll do as many as it takes, but I’m planning for 10.

During at least one of those sessions, I want to reach the best word count per hour I’ve ever reached, and I’m going to reach it by having fun with this damn book. I love the characters. There’s no reason it should be so damn hard to have fun.

Now, I’m going to go trim my fingernails so I can get my first session started.

Session # Cumulative Words WPH
1 29 82.85714
2 54 77.14286
3 72 68.57143
4 82 58.57143
5 142 81.14286
6 251 119.5238
7 285 116.3265
8 0
9 0
10 0

Okay, so I’m calling it a night. It’s 12:29 am and I’m disappointed at my speeds tonight. I spent a lot of time redoing a chapter but I’m glad I did it, because I like what I’ve got now better than what I had.

I’m 3 sessions short of the 10 I wanted to do. I’m also short a ton of words. On the other hand, I totally don’t feel like a failure, because I literally did the best I could tonight. I took short breaks when I had to, and I focused hard when I wrote. I just can’t always predict what kind of writing day I’m going to have. This was one of those days.

So all in all, I’m satisfied. But one thing for sure: I’m going to do better tomorrow, because I’m going to start a lot earlier and I’m going to put in the extra sessions if I come up short on word counts like I did this evening.

But 12:33 pm is too late to keep going if I want to get some sleep tonight. The one thing I can count on is waking up at 7 in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. I need to go to bed before it gets any later.

See you here again tomorrow.