Last week was a good week, wordcount wise. I always like getting into the actual writing of a book, because it feels like real progress is being made.
Mostly, the speed is an illusion, because plotting just doesn’t have any benchmarks to show things are progressing–you can mull in your head for days and have nothing to show for it but a single scene idea, while even an hour of writing feels like you’re making headway (which isn’t always true).
I’m writing this late on Monday night, and even though I don’t get to report it here in word count, today I actually finished the book. But for last week, here;s the word counts for my “day job” portion of writing:
MONDAY; 4,856
TUESDAY: 9,242
WEDNESDAY: 6,639
THURSDAY; 6,853
FRIDAY; 6,641
SATURDAY; 5,342
SUNDAY; 3,152
TOTAL FOR THE WEEK: 42,725 words
That’s just shy of 8K over my usual “budget”.
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As far as the spare time writing goes — more plotting, with a gradually filling-out outline. Lots of research interspersed with the plotting. Also, lots of peripheral reading on thriller techniques, too.
And just to prove there is no such thing as a perfect week, last week everything BUT the writing derailed itself. I reported on that in this week’s newsletter.
Which goes to prove that despite a lack of perfect weeks, you can still enjoy productive ones.
As I’m back into plotting again this week (and I’m really looking forward to this next book), I’ll be thinking about milestones within the plotting process that conveys a sense of progress.
I would like to use those milestones to measure progress on the thrillers.
One of the things I’ve been reminded of with this spare time writing is that when you’re not spending hours a day working on a book, it can seem like the process can take forever. I’m starting to get impatient with myself for not having the thrillers outlined yet, which is ridiculous when I spend a fraction of the time on them that I do on my day-job books.
So I think this week I will focus upon making some serious progress on the thrillers. I will look for a way to quantify the work I’m doing on them. Even though it will be an artificial construct, as there is no real way to measure “thinking”, it will give me a sense of progress and also something to report to you.
Until then, back to work, all of us.
t.