Tag: Writing fiction

I write fiction—it’s how I earn my living—and I like to ramble. Just so you know. Nearly everything I do these days relates in some way to writing and publishing, so most of my posts are here.

Doing 15 minute sessions back-to-back

Lynn

Today’s plan is to do 15 minute sessions back-to-back and only take a break when I have to. Knowing me, I’ll probably have to much too often, but at least now that I’m writing in the dining room again, I seem to be able to get back to it pretty quickly when no one else is around (and no one else is around today). :D

I’m thinking 12 sessions would be a good number, since that’d put me at 3 hours, which is probably what I’ll need to get my 1,557 words today, because I’ve needed at least that long the last 4 days. So onward! I’ll update this post as I go. :D

I ended up with just over 1600 words for the day, although I can’t say exactly how many because I’m writing this update on my phone from my bed. :D I forgot to update last night and wanted to do it before I got busy with today’s writing. The exact number doesn’t matter anyway. It was another win and it feels fantastic. ;)

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.

Challenge day eight (seriously!)

Lynn

This could take all month! Yesterday, unfortunately, I really underestimated how long the taxes thing would take. I left at 11 am and returned at 4:30 pm. By the time I ate an early supper, it was 5:30 and I was so brain tired I had a difficult time even thinking about getting started again.

I came not even close to 6,000 words yesterday.

Today I am at it again. It’s 10:23 am, I’m about to go make my hot honey lemon water for a boost, and I’ve already spent 1 hour and 20 minutes writing.

Sadly, that’s added up to a very paltry 107 words! I am so off my pace I can’t even understand what’s going on. Last night, I had a 52 minute stretch where I averaged less than one word per minute when all was said and done. I know I wrote more than that, but it was write, delete, write, delete, write, delete until all I’d done was increase my word count by 50 words.

I just cannot figure out why my pace is so bad on this book. I’m dealing with SO MUCH hesitation with everything I write for it that I’m spending TONS of time editing/cycling through/rewriting as I go. I just can’t get a handle on it.

I have a dentist appointment today that’s really going to mess up my day, but I’m going to do my best to finish out the day with 7 more hours at 842 words per hour.

For that to happen, something’s really going to have to break loose soon, but I am ever hopeful.

Going too far afield (challenge update)

Lynn

I’m afraid I’m going to lose some words today. The current material is going too far afield of the scenes I’ve already written. I had hoped they would join up but now it’s not looking good for that possibility.

I’m at 965 words for the morning and I’m still trying to reach 2000 before lunch. That’s with 2 hours and 5 minutes of writing. I’ve been careful of breaks but obviously I’m still losing time somewhere. I got started at 8:36 and it’s 11:15 now.

Back to the book. Too much to do to tinker.

Too much second guessing (challenge update)

Lynn

It’s obvious to me that one big problem for me when it comes to speed is the speed at which I second guess my choices.

Today’s attempt to cross that 6,000 word barrier has been hampered at every turn by my tendency to write something, then write something else, then delete something, then delete something else, then rewrite the first something I wrote, before deleting it and starting the whole process over again.

That’s not the way to gather speed and momentum.

It’s 7:53 pm and I’ve let myself turn on WiFi on my computer so I can write this update. I knew it would be much faster than trying to do it on my phone and even though I have only written 1,225 words today, I’m still hopeful of more.

However, 6,000 words is probably shooting for the moon when I have no rocket.

For today.

For tomorrow, well, tomorrow hasn’t started yet. We’ll have to see about that.

For now, I’m signing off. I have more words to write, even if meeting the 6,000 word challenge is beyond me tonight. I’ll start this thing again in the morning and see how it goes.

First priority? Stop second guessing everything I put on the page.

Challenge morning three

Lynn

I’m just going to keep trying until I get there. Yesterday I fell far short of 6,000 words, so here I go again. (A phrase that totally just played through my head with music.)

I’ve had breakfast and I have my hot honey lemon water beside me and my WiFi off.

Estimated time to completion is again 10 hours. The last two days I’ve clocked in at just under 7 and enjoyed most of them so I can do this!

Also, it became very clear to me this morning why I’ve been writing so slowly but I’ll have to explain that later. Typing on my phone is much too slow.

Too little momentum (challenge update)

Lynn

I’m just shy of 2,000 words and it’s taken me just over five hours to get there.

I’m doing better than yesterday, but nowhere near good enough to reach 6,000 words by my bedtime today unless something changes significantly.

I do expect to finish today with a much better word count than yesterday though.

One thing I’m sure has hurt me is that I came up about 2 hours short on sleep last night. I’m already feeling run down. Then I started writing almost an hour later today than yesterday.

Slow going (challenge update)

Lynn

By 9:51 this morning I had spent 1 hour and 12 minutes writing and reached 424 words after starting with a 145 word deficit from a last minute deletion last night.

I’m not unhappy with that, really, but it wasn’t really what I was hoping for either so, since I was dragging a bit, I went ahead and took an early lunch.

I’m back now and ready to try again. 

Ten hours is a lot and I really need to avoid any extra breaks today to reach it, but I’m definitely hoping ten hours might not be necessary to reach 6,000 words. :)

Challenge morning redux

Lynn

It’s 8:14 am, I have my hot honey lemon water next to me, and my computer set to power saver mode to maximize the battery.

I did get up early again today but I’ve been dragging a bit. NPR.org is definitely going to have to go onto my no read list for my web reading challenge. It’s turning into a crutch for me when I’m seeking out easy distractions.

Time to write. :)

Oh, and I added the WordPress app to my phone and it’s so much easier than using the phone browser, despite how good the mobile site is. I’m very happy with the change so far.

Giving up on the dream—but only for today (challenge update)

Lynn

I’ll have to try again tomorrow to break through the 6,000 word ceiling I seem to have. Although admittedly, it felt more like a 1,000 word ceiling today!

I logged about 7 solid hours of writing (sans interruptions, breaks, etc) and still have only managed to reach 1,495 words for the day. I’ll continue writing up until I’m ready to go to sleep, but there’s no way I’m meeting the 6,000 words challenge by then. I want to get up early again tomorrow, and that means getting to bed soon enough. I might write another 30 minutes, all told, before I call it a night.

I have to say, the writing wasn’t difficult despite the challenge I had with speed. I’ve been trying to find my way. Sometimes that’s slow going. I’ve been having difficulties with this scene and the ones that follow (some are written, as I mentioned in another post, and I’m just hoping they’ll join up when the time comes) and because of that I’ve put off working my way through it when I should have just tried to keep going even if it meant slow days.

That’s a problem with chasing speed. On days when things just can’t go fast, it becomes easier to do nothing than to face what feels like failure.

I feel like today was a mix of success and failure. Failure to reach 6,000, obviously, but success in getting back in the groove of all day writing and actually enjoying it.

It was a fun day.

And I’ll see you again tomorrow as I try this thing one more time.

Remaining hopeful despite bleak numbers (challenge update)

Lynn

I’m remaining hopeful despite the  bleak numbers because I have at least made it to almost 1000 words today. The fact that it has taken me over 4 hours to get there is irrelevant. (4 hours of writing, not just 4 hours ununfortunately.)

I will carry on until the end because sometimes writing is slow and sometimes it isn’t. A couple of good hours could really turn things around.

 

Uh oh! (challenge update)

Lynn

Here is my first challenge update.

I’m way behind already.

After 1 hour and 49 minutes, I’m only up by 149 words.

Getting through the last of the material I wrote a few weeks ago is taking too long. Perfectionism? Probably. I’m going to try to get through the rest of it faster.

As of right now I still have the computer WIFI off. I’m writing this on my phone. It’s easier to do all new posts on my phone than edit a really long one so I expect all updates to this challenge will be separate posts today.

Be back later. :)

Hopefully with better numbers!

Challenge morning

Lynn

So I’m typing this out on my Kindle Fire because I decided last night that I would turn off my computer WIFI and start the day without it. I plan to stick to that.

I’m up early. It’s 7:05, and I have a bowl of cereal next to me to finish, then it’s on to writing. Wish me luck. I’m going to need it. :)

Revising is not a good idea; how to fuck up a story

Lynn

I had to make a few changes to my book. I try not to do much when I go back to already written material, but in this case, I had an issue I couldn’t work out and when the solution came to me, it meant adding a few things. I don’t know what it is about how I write, but it’s almost impossible for me to write something and just plop it into the middle of an already written scene. It just never seems to fit in and I have to work to make a place for it.

So I did that with the fix and probably tweaked a bit more than I should have.

Yep, I know I did. How do I know?

Because I got through chapter 13 last night, and when I reached 15, I had some stuff that totally didn’t make sense anymore because I’d gone back and put stuff in related to it thinking I’d skipped that issue altogether and yet there it was, fully fleshed out in a later chapter.

Ugh.

This is where I just leave it, fix chapter 15 so it won’t matter and KEEP GOING.

Like I said, I try not to get caught up in making the kinds of changes that count as revising. I cycle through my document as I go, building and growing the story, and most of the time I do end up cycling from the beginning at least once, but it’s best if I do it when the story is fresh—not when I’m trying to get the story back into my head.

When the story isn’t fresh, I’m much more likely to make mistakes like this and end up in revision territory, and I do not like revision. I can’t keep the various versions of a story straight—all the bits and pieces float around and I get confused about which ones are really there and which ones I’ve deleted. It’s best I stay as far from that as possible, because that’s the kind of stuff that makes me hate writing. And feel blocked and have to move on to another story for a while or just not write.

So anyway, yes, I’m still working on getting through this story to arrive at all fresh blank empty pages, but I’m a lot closer now than I was. To be honest, if I don’t finish it today, I’m going to—

You know what? It doesn’t matter, because I’m going to get through it today. I’m going to do it and that’s that.

Still making progress, but still much too slow

Lynn

I’m making progress on this book, still, but it’s still too slow. I mean, really, way too slow. Yesterday, I ended with a net gain of 274 words. Today I’ll spend as much time on the book as possible, so we’ll see where I end up.

As of this moment, I’m on chapter 9 and it should be nothing but a basic read through fixing typos until I hit a specific scene where I need to add in some stuff that goes along with the fix I made several chapters back. Then at chapter 17 stuff gets kind of messy. I have several scenes written that went in one direction before I doubled back to 17 and took off in another. We’ll see if they eventually join up. I’m hoping. I really like them.

It boils down to just needing to make sure I actually get the time in that I want to spend on the book today. That has been my biggest issue the last few days, not writing too slowly. (Just a little of that. :D) Mostly it’s just a factor of time. I need to get started, stay focused on it, and do that for most of the day.

I really believe I can do it. The only thing stopping me is me.

Too bad I’m not still drinking coffee. It’d come in really handy right about now.

How many hours did I work last year on writing?

Lynn

I figure about 40 hours per book for publishing tasks. I can double that to 80 if I want to include every last thing I do like studying book cover design and process tweaks like creating new Word style sheets and so on.

I wrote 220,071 words.

My speed range is 250–1200 words per hour, with the vast majority coming in between 400–600. My all time average back when I was tracking that was 541 wph.

That’s 407 hours for the writing.

I wrote 3 novels and 2 novelettes last year. I’m going with 80 hours each because I don’t want to undersell the effort I put in.

That’s 400 hours on publishing.

That’s 807 hours total.

That’s 15.52 hours a week for 52 weeks, or 16.14 hours a week for 50 weeks.

So 16 hours a week.

Holy crap. I’m barely working a part time job.

The numbers make me feel pretty good about the money, but it shouldn’t. I mean, no matter how much I earned per hour, I still only worked about 16 hours a week. My gross income is nowhere near where I want it.

Then there’s this: There are so many books I want to write, and I’m not getting them written at my current level of effort.

Next year, I’m going to revisit this calculation.

This year I’m going to be trying to level up. :)

We’ll see how it goes without timers, schedules, or goals to direct that effort. Honestly, I haven’t done all that well in years past using them, so I’m not that worried it’s going to hurt anything. I expect it will help (in the long run).

I’M NOT YELLING

Lynn

Yesterday was a bit of a letdown. Sure, I wrote, but my net word count came in at 9 words. I spent some time working, but I also spent A LOT of time doing I don’t know what, because I didn’t do any web reading except for a single visit to DWS’s website yesterday morning and some late evening searches. I didn’t read any fiction, except my own book, and I didn’t do much of anything else either.

So where’d the time go? I have no idea.

One thing I know: I don’t believe I worked as much on my book as I wanted to. I think if I had, I’d be further along.

I made it to chapter 6 at 12:56 PM (from my notes) and finally reached chapter 7 at 4:36. Yes, I did some minor deleting and redrafting in that scene, but I can see it wasn’t very much at all now that I’ve looked over it this morning. Just a few lines here and there, definitely not 2.5 hours worth (the missing hour and a half is lunch). Except, yes, it probably was 2.5 hours because I tend to get lost in that stuff, tweaking and rewriting sentences until I finally hit on one that just feels right.

It’s not the best way, that’s for sure. I wish I didn’t do that kind of thing. I can’t tell if it’s perfectionism, or if it’s just the way my brain works.

As of this morning, I am still only halfway through chapter 7, which means I know I didn’t do much after 4:36 PM. I know that because I read through this chapter a few days ago, and I remember thinking there wasn’t a lot to fix here. Maybe one or two lines. So I should have gotten through this section quickly. Yet I’m still there.

Anyway, all that said, today I have things to do that mean I won’t be home for a chunk of the day but I still need to make some SIGNIFICANT progress on this book today.

Last night, at about 7:02, I installed RescueTime. 12 minutes later, I uninstalled it. Then I installed ManicTime. I loved it, really, but it didn’t do the ONE THING I wanted, which was record only active time in a document. I don’t care how long my document is open and in focus on my screen. I need to know how much time I spend working on that document—writing time. So I uninstalled it too.

Then I found Timekeeper for Word, which could give me the exact info I want. Except it’s for Word 2016, 2013, or 2010. I don’t write in my Word 2016 install. I tried to, for a while, but I couldn’t stop hating it. I use Word 2007. I opened Word 2016 anyway, just to see if I could convince myself it would be worth going to if I could have this awesome record of my time spent writing.

Nope. Couldn’t do it.

So I’m back to basics. I’m just going to jot down my start and end times today in my notebook and leave it at that. All I really want is something to tell me how much time I’m spending on my writing, since I’m not using timers, schedules, or explicit goals this year to tell me what I should be doing and how badly I’m failing.

I just need a rough figure so I can aim to do better. :) Getting better is important to me, and I want to write a lot of books this year, because life is short and who knows when my time will run out. I don’t want to look back from my deathbed (if I’m given that moment) and think about all the time I didn’t spend writing when I could have. And I will, because that’s me.

*I’ve been using all caps as emphasis in email and text since the late nineties and I’m sick of holding back because some other people have decided it means I’m shouting at them. If you don’t like all caps in text, I suggest you not read my blog. :D