Talk about progress…

My first entry on this blog was July 31, 2008.  At that time, I had written 30,141 words.  Today, I’ve opened up my novel and find I’m at 80,143 words.  That’s 50,002 words in the span of 3 1/2 months (113 days to be exact).  It seems like a ton of work.  It seems like it’s hard and arduous to do.  You look at a number like 50,002 words and say, “whew, that’s a bunch” (ignoring you Na”No”ers who are trying to get to the 50,000 word mark in a month).  In reality, that 50,002 words reflects a relaxed pace — it only took an average off 442.5 words each day to get there.

Yes there have been slow days where you only get a couple hundred words out in the span of a couple of hours, and yes those days are frustrating.  There are also good days, where 1,000 words seem to leave your fingers in the span of one hour and you’re so into it you keep chugging through and end up with a very accomplished day.

There are days that you are sick.  There are days work drains you, and you’re stuck in traffic for hours trying to get home.  There’s the game that you just have to watch.  Occasionally, you’re obligated to visit family.  The dog ate something it found on the floor and is throwing up everywhere, so you have to follow it around with a mop and bucket.

Guess what — those things happen to everybody.  They happen to me, to you, to the random guy you don’t know.  And it’s okay.  There are days you literally can’t write (can’t get to a computer, broke all your fingers, etc…).  There are days you really don’t feel like writing.  You have to differentiate between the two.  On days you can’t write, you don’t write.  On days you don’t feel like writing, too bad.  Do it.  You’ll thank yourself in a few months when you have a completed draft.

Caught Up

I’ve managed to catch up to where I would’ve been had I not experienced the technical difficulties a couple weeks back.  I’m a little shy of 70,000 words, but I’ll make that by the end of next week, leaving me with 40,000 words and 7 weeks to complete the first draft.  At that pace, I would need about 952 words/day to finish on time, assuming 6 days/week of writing.

This next week may be a little slow — I have several long days of work coming up due to election day — but that’s already been anticipated and why I only expect to crank out a few thousand words over that span.  The following week, I have four days off with no real plans other than to write, and in addition to the regularly scheduled holidays I have a floating holiday that has to be used by the end of the year, and several more vacation days that I could use if I wanted to (and will use if I find I need to in order to finish the draft on time).  The days off have higher writing targets — I generally want to get 1,500+ words done on those days, because I often split my writing into two sessions — one in either the morning or afternoon and one in the evening.  I basically count it as two separate days of writing, since the intent of the day is to do writing, and then of course I have my regularly scheduled writing session at night.  Those days off will lessen the burden on the rest of the days, but even 952 words/night is manageable.

I expect that I will be done with the first draft by December 31st, and plan on ringing in the New Year with a celebration of that completion (I feel that scotch and stokes will be appropriate).

Feels good to be going again.

I now have my laptop back, and my desktop is fully functioning.  Over the last few days, I’ve made some good headway, and have been making up lost ground — I’ve already made up for three of the five days in which I had been unable to write.

It feels really good to be writing again, I must say.  Since I have gotten into the habit of writing six or seven days a week, it’s become a comfortable part of my routine.  It was very frustrating skipping nearly a week’s worth of writing.  I think that’s the key — once you get to the point where you feel bad about missing a day of writing, not because you know you have to write just about every day, but because you want to write everyday, you’ve reached the first stepping stone to success (note: when I say success, I mean however you choose to define success, whether it means simply finishing a book, getting published, or whatever else it may mean to you).

It seems that it’s taken about six weeks to get to that point — where a daily ritual becomes habit.  It’s also taken the realization that the word count is always going up, getting closer to that goal.  I’ve often found that it can be difficult to see the trees for the forest — 300 words (the smallest tree I plant on any given day) isn’t a big hunk out of 110,000 (the forest I’m expecting to end up with), but 300 words each day still gets you to that inevitable goal.  I’ve gone from the frustration of feeling like I’m so far away to the joy of seeing my progress on a regular basis.

I do think having this blog has helped tremendously.  Beyond the support from my readers (and I do thank you all for the kind words you’ve relayed), it allows me to see my progress over time.  When I first started the blog, I had just broken the 30,000 word mark.  I’m now at more than double that.  Realizing how far I’ve come is a huge motivator for me.

I’ve also come to realize that I don’t need inspiration to sit down and write — the act of sitting down and writing instead inspires itself.  Now I will say that I get the occasional “that’s brilliant!” moment, while sitting at work or driving around somewhere, which then inspires me to write the next passage in the book.  Yet, even when I don’t get those moments, I don’t worry too much about it.  Once I start writing, while the first few words may take a little time to get down, the words eventually pick up momentum and fly out on their own.

It feels good to write, and it definately feels good to be back at it.

Apparently I need to go to work.

This past weekend, I took two days off to give myself a long weekend.  My expectation was that I’d spend the extra time writing and make some good headway.  Instead, I spent a lot of time staring at a computer screen with very few words coming out.  My grand total for the four-day weekend?  Just over 1,000 words (actually, that’s for three days — Saturday is my day “off” because I tend to be booked from morning to night).

Today, I went back to work.  Upon getting home, I fell right into my normal routine, including pounding out the words.  So far, I’ve written about 500 words and will probably get out 300-400 more tonight.  Apparently, going to work provides exactly the motivation I need to get the words out of my head.

Who’da thunk it?

Sometimes you need a swift kick in the…

So I started this blog 12 days ago, and as you can see (based on the fact that this is my third post in that time frame), it’s really “helped” me write consistently.  That being said, I did just get a nice little jolt to help me get going again.

Thanks to networking sites like myspace and facebook, I stay in (some degree of) contact with lots of people I went to school with, including high school, undergrad and law school.  One of my law school classmates has been into writing, and is more dedicated about it than I am.  I knew that she had finished a novel awhile ago (sometime earlyish last year).  Getting back into contact with her, I’ve found out that not only did she finish the sequel to that novel, but both are being published (the first coming out next year), and the publisher has an option for the third.

I’m extremely proud of her — it’s an amazing accomplishment and she’s very deserving — but at the same time, I can’t help but see the green-eyed monster rearing its ugly head.  I want that to be me — two books down, many to go, with a publishing contract already in hand.

The upside is that this has provided me with (at least temporarily) the swift kick in the ass necessary to get writing again.  I pumped out over 1,000 words today, and feel good about pumping out more tomorrow.  I think it also helps that I’m currently struggling in the midst of a long battle, but I can see the light of the resolution.  This battle has turned into one of those passages where you really just want to get through it to get to the next plot point, but the battle is still important to the overall novel.  I can already forsee some massive changes when I get to editing, but that may simply be due to my current desire to move past it.

I’ve thought about skipping ahead, but that’s something I want to avoid — while I have a general outline of the novel, I like being able to make modifications mid-stream.  If I write the next section before I finish this one, I’ve locked myself in to only writing what will fit with the next section.

At least the battle is almost over.  Once that happens (hopefully this week), I’m hoping that the words start flowing faster.