Well, it wasn’t a complete failure today 😛 I did write 2,143 solid words.
I think I’m a bit bushwhacked you guys. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow, though. I’m thinking I need a day off, a full one, before we go on our trip up north. But, we’ll see.
This week has been an up and down affair, let me tell you, but what it has done is give me hope that I can meet deadlines. I can write pretty fucking fast, you guys. And that means I can get through shit quickly if I need to. And I *will* need to before you can even snap your fingers. I can also foresee a future where I can pretty consistently churn out 5,000 words a day, five days a week. That’s in about 4 hours of writing. It’s once I go beyond the 4-hour mark that I seem to really slow down and start to feel some pretty hefty fatigue that carries over into the next day.
But, that’s just true right now. Maybe that will change. We’ll see, won’t we?
Why am I so obsessed right now with measuring my word count and figuring out how many words I can write in a day? That’s a very valid question, and one I don’t know if I’ve actually answered. It’s really quite simple: once I figure out how long it takes me to do something, my anxiety level about being able to complete that ‘something’ goes way, way down.
Right now, I don’t know how long it takes me to do write a book (generally speaking, of course — there are always exceptions). That stresses me the fuck out. This is something that my blogging has taught me about myself. So, naturally, I want to get past this phase of just being generally anxious about my work and get into the phase where I can plan out my schedule and know with relative certainty that I can finish x-y-and-z on a certain date.
So, I’m tracking the shit out of everything. After a couple solid months of data, and when it finally seems like I’ve fallen into a rhythm, I’ll look through that data and figure out how long everything really takes me. That will be a glorious, glorious day, you guys. I’m looking forward to it so very much.
The writing was a see-saw today. Loved some of it, didn’t like some other. I posted the first several chapters of “Starstuff” up on WattPad today, too, which made me way more nervous than I thought it would…which means I’m glad I did it. It’s a test run of sorts for publishing on Amazon. Get some of those jitters out of the way before the big show. I feel like a rookie baseball player, getting reps in down in the minors.
I also sent my first 3,000 words of the novel to someone in the 20Booksto50k group, and he had some thoughts about the opening pages. I took those thoughts, and I turned out a brand-new cold open for the book, one that basically sums up the entire series, really. I hope it works. I think it works. We’ll see what people think about it and then go from there. If people hate it or are indifferent…we’ll scrap it.
That’s what I’ve got for y’all tonight. I have 30 minutes of reading to get in so I don’t break the chain. Then sleep.
Good night!