Project October 2018: Week One
Day 1: 2,723
Day 2: 0
Day 3: 0
Day 4: 1,151
Day 5: 0
Day 6: 0
Day 7: 4,065
Total: 7,939
Last year, I set out to do a Project October intensive writing month (31,000 words in 31 days) and ended up writing a grand total of zero words (you can read all about it here, here, here and here) due to a variety of circumstances. Almost immediately after that, I went back to a full-time, non-writing job that has ever since taken up an awful lot of my time, more than I ever planned for it to. And even though I’ve written a little bit here and a little bit there, compared to the three years I spent writing full-time, I feel like I’ve written virtually nothing.
As I approached the half way mark of2018, I decided it was time for another Project October. I made the decision that I wasn’t going to work on any of my fiction. I was still trying to finalise and publish my latest novel, Black Spot, and while I wanted to be writing, I didn’t want my focus pulled away from getting that book out there. Plus, I was running out of blog posts rapidly. So I decided to aim for 31 blog posts in 31 days. Not only would that fill out my blog post schedule for the next seven months, it would be a significant contribution towards finishing Project June, the third book in my series of non-fiction about the writing, editing, publishing and marketing process (since Project December, Project January and Project June are all collections of my blog posts).
Clearly, though, it wasn’t going to be a normal Project October in which I aim for 1,000 words each day. I knew that because there are days when I wake up, go to my non-writing job, come home, eat, continue with non-writing freelance work and then go to sleep without ever having an opportunity to write. If I’m lucky, I may have jotted down an idea or two but it’s nothing that contributes to any type of word count. So this Project October would be a month of binge writing: writing as much as possible on the days I could, knowing that there would be days when I wouldn’t be able to write at all.
The first week has proven my decision prophetic. Day 1 was a Sunday and I wanted to get off to a good start. I wrote three blog posts. Day 2 was a Monday and after a long day at work, I came home and fell asleep before I could even contemplate cracking open my laptop. On Day 3, two pieces of freelance work came in by email while I was at work and I spent that evening doing it. Still, I’d written so much on Day 1, I was only fractionally behind on my intended word count.
By Day 4, though, I knew that wasn’t the case anymore. I came home from work, managed to stay awake and didn’t have any freelance work that needed to be done. I was determined to make the most of it. I wrote 1,151 words, bringing the total to 3,874. Not exactly on target but even within those four days, I’d written more than in the previous four months.
On Day 5, I went to work, came home, prepared and ate dinner, and then took my traditional Thursday after-work phone call from my grandfather. We spoke for an hour and a half, mostly about football, which after my grandmother is the love of his life. No chance for writing unless I sacrificed sleep and trust me, nobody wants to be around me the next day when I’ve sacrificed sleep the night before.
On Day 6, I went to work, went to the supermarket to do my weekly shop after work, came home, decided I’d earned an alcoholic drink, drank it, then promptly fell asleep before I’d even had any dinner.
Which brings me to Day 7, a Saturday. I’ve had another writing binge and the daily total sits at 4,060, so I’m not just on target at this stage of my intensive writing month, I’m smashing it. I’m pleased because if this Project October hadn’t gone well, I would have been thoroughly disheartened. As much as I would like to, there isn’t any prospect of me quitting my non-writing job at the moment (even though I don’t like how much of my time it takes up, I’m addicted to the financial security). So I have to figure out how to work (and do freelance work) and write at the same time. I haven’t been very successful at it in the recent past, although I used to be. Hopefully, I’m on my way to figuring it out again.
