March check-in: Crunching numbers

[image error]Time for another update on writing the final book of the Sisters of Chaos trilogy.

I started February needing to do some catch up, having only reached 2,500 words of my 10,000-word goal in January. Combined with nearly a week of downtime as I struggled with a particular scene, overall I ended up needing to double my planned monthly goal to reach 20,000 words by the end of February. Yes, I could have altered my overall word count goals rather than pushing so hard to try to get back on track within one month, but I didn’t want to set a precedent for letting myself fall behind and choosing to take care of it later. After all, the whole point of these writing goals is to keep me on track.

And in the end, I succeeded at reaching 20,000 words by the end of February. In fact, I succeeded so well that I decided I would double my writing goals. Instead of writing a 120,000-word draft within a year, I will continue writing 20,000 words per month to hopefully finish the draft in six months. That’s still only around 660 words per day to write; hardly a heavy writing session.

The month started off well, with me reaching that daily goal without much trouble for much of last week. However, I skipped writing on Friday. I wanted to write yesterday for both days, but ended up only writing one day’s worth of words. Between trying to figure out precisely how many words I need to write to stay on track and the complexity of a cumulative writing goal that doesn’t start at 0, determining my updated daily word count goal has become far too difficult a task for a quick calculation. So, just now, I decided to create a spreadsheet to track my goals and my actual progress.

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Incidentally, I now know a few tricks in OpenOffice Calc that I didn’t before.

This will make it a lot easier for me to both track my actual and planned progress and update my writing goals to ensure I reach my ultimate goal on time. I really had wanted to just catch up on Friday’s writing to bring my daily goal back to what it should be for the month, but the calculation was a bit too complicated for me to want to deal with, so I integrated it into my daily word count goals for the rest of the month. It’s only a difference of 10 words per day, after all.

One thing skipping Friday’s work has taught me is that this new goal of 20,000 words per month means that missing a day is a much bigger issue than when I’m only trying to reach 10,000. That provides additional motivation not to miss a day. However, given that I don’t write the exact number of words needed per day—it’s not the flag at the end of a level in Super Mario Bros., it’s the barely passing grade—

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Keep running, you lazy sot.

I should gradually pull ahead as the month goes on. That should give me a little breathing room for when I don’t meet my goal, and is a lot easier to swallow than just trying to increase my next day’s work to meet that 660 words for each day.

I don’t normally put this much work into organizing my efforts, but the fact is, as my family has learned, once I get the bug in me to organize something, there is no stopping me until the task is thoroughly completed. I don’t do things halfway. And in truth, breaking the overall goal down into the small, daily objectives makes it both seem a lot more doable and motivates me more to continue.

The writing itself is going both faster and slower than I thought. Slower because at around 660 words per writing session, it takes several days of work to finish a single scene. Yet the cumulative result, given that I now have over 24,000 words in the story, is that the story is advancing quicker than I’d anticipated. Of course, it’s been entirely too long since I’ve been writing—not editing or tweaking or revising—a novel.

So it’s been nice to get back into it. As a story I’m plantsing more than it feels like I did with the previous two books, it’s taken some minor turns I hadn’t considered and made me think about some other aspects to the novel. One in particular is that, given that this is the end of the series, anything left that I want to say I need to do so in this book. That in mind, I’ve been allowing myself to expand on things like character development for secondary characters and how they are reacting to the changes in their lives, which I had initially dismissed as not immediately relevant to the story.

Now, the fact that this is a first draft means that it might all end up being cut anyway. At this stage, I’m taking the NaNoWriMo approach of just getting the words down and leaving editing for later. I did write the first couple lines of a new opening scene intended to replace the one I already wrote. In the nature of a first draft, though, I haven’t bothered to go back to it yet.

(As a bonus, the spreadsheet will also allow me to track those words I place elsewhere through the manuscript, not just what I append to the end and manually word count.)

In short, writing is progressing well and now I’m looking forward to having a first draft finished around the end of July. If I manage it, then reaching my soft goal of halving the time between the release of books 2 and 3 means I would have three years (minus time for publication) to edit the draft.

I think I can do it.