Today was a big win in that it felt like just another day at work, and shiiiit, guys, that’s basically been my goal in a nutshell for the past month and a half: just find normal again.
I wrote 4,000 *good* words like it was nothing. Almost like it was nothing 😛 It did take me all day. But damn…they were good words, and they’re done now. I have scenes that are WORKING.
There’s definitely going to be work still to come once I get to the end of this second draft. I can tell already I’m going to need to figure out how to trim this story and keep from getting bogged down or over-bloated. But at least I have stuff to work with now, stuff that’s alive in my imagination and not just spit out because I wanted to hit a word count.
I’m done with word counts. I don’t think I actually realized that till just now, but it’s true. DONE. I now have STORY goals instead of word count goals. Those make more sense to me. They don’t overwhelm me. A *story* based goalpost is one that I can actually sprint towards. Not a word count. I wrote those 4,000 words today in probably…three hours. That’s about 1,300 words per hour, which is just as fast as when I was tracking word count like a mad man. I don’t need to do that. I just need to set bite-sized story goals and get that shit done each day.
I actually stopped one scene short today, but it really, REALLY is okay. I wrote 4,000 brand-new words today, which is TWO CHAPTERS worth of words really…so it was okay. 9pm was when I pulled the plug, and that also seems like a reasonable stopping point. I’ll get up tomorrow and continue. I actually did some scene outlining inside Scrivener today, which was another sign to me that my writing anxiety is starting to recede back down to normal levels. It didn’t stress me out to do that. It was helpful, in fact. Saved me some time going between pages and Scrivener.
Aight, kids, it’s time for sleeps. Night night.