Bowing to peer pressure or how my life implodes at 10 thousand words a week.

HI! I’m not sure if you remember me? I’m the person who used to write the monday blogs but then…I don’t know, things just hit some kind of tipping point in my life and I could only hold onto two things at a time. Neither of them was this blog, grocery shopping, taking showers or leaving my home in real clothes.

I’ve been listening to podcasts and reading interviews with authors who talk about how much work they produce or produced during the most productive time in their lives. Sylvia Day in a recent RWR interview said that during the early days of her career, she wrote seven days a week, giving up time with family and missing some big events. Kristin Ashley said in a podcast that most days she can work for 12 hours – straight. What was her average? 20,000 words a day or something wild? Steph?

A good friend of ours, Juliana Stone, just hit the USA TODAY list with her self-published box set about the Barker Triplets. And I saw first hand how damn hard she worked.

This has utterly blown up my world. I’ve waffled between fury at their obvious lies (that’s my coping mechanism, anger at them and thinking they are lying – I never claimed to be gracious or mature) and feeling miserable about my own slow down in productivity. I’ve gotten involved in my kids school, I’m trying to exercise more, I’ve grown accustomed to not working on the weekends.

Well, I decided that had to stop and I gave myself an insane half book deadline for just before Christmas. Which meant, being realistic about Thanksgiving, a book release and what I could really get away with on the weekends – that I would have a little more than a month to write between 40-50 thousand words. I know that people work much faster – I know about NaNOWriMO. I get it. But this felt big – and you know something – it is. It’s really big and I realized quite effectively why I can’t do more than this. And that maybe I shouldn’t.

Part of it is that this book is not my most clearly thought out. Though, frankly, I could say that about each of them at the beginning. They’re bloby, messy half cloud, half real bits of movies I’ve seen or books I’ve read all staring Matt Damon. But I get the beginning scene in my head and I go. And then I get the next few and then sometime around Chapter 4 when something has to be revealed that will change reader expectations I grind to a painful miserable halt. And I spend three days editing the first 3 chapters and then, at some point out of the blue while I’m walking the dog, or doing the dishes, having drinks with Sinead and Maureen or screaming at my kids in the grocery store – the thing comes to me. And then I’m off again. And then, it’s Chapter 7 and something else has to happen, a reversal, a page-turning bit of backstory, a small plot point that isn’t so big now, but gets a big pay off in the black moment. And I stop for three days…edit, futz, clean up my in box and then lightening and I’m off again.

This is inevitable. And I don’t know how to stop it. And it’s why I’m not sure I can write any faster than I’m writing. Or if I should. Because yes, I could pound through those blocks, and maybe in the end I would get to the same place. But somehow, I doubt it.

So, I’m writing faster, but I’m pretty sure this is as fast as I can go.

What about you? How fast are you writing? Can you work faster? Should you?