50+ words a day...no matter what!

[Post-Crisis D]

If I maintain my current pace, I'll beat my August word count, so, yay!  Although writing three stories at the same time is not easy.  And the lame space opera is just dragging along.  I'm afraid to check the word count on the current chapter.

Also, some of you may remember some of the drawings I've posted previously in the thread.  I have a special project I'm going to do and need some feedback as to which drawing should be used.  I have a poll in the Deep Space Infinity forum here and would appreciate votes/feedback/etc.  Thanks!

[Post-Crisis D]

I bested my August word count.  Went from under 400 words per day to just over 500.  This was primarily thanks to a last minute push yesterday to hit the 500 word average.  Otherwise, I would have been just under 500 which doesn't sound as impressive as just over 500.

I'm going to pause my superhero story this month and maybe come back to it sometime in the future.  At 20k words in, it's not going anywhere, probably because while I had an idea for the characters and basic story, I never had a real plot.  And plodding along isn't creating a plot either.  So, best to put it on the backburner until I figure something out.  Bummer is that it is a sequel of sorts to another story I wrote, which has not yet been published.  I planned on publishing it this year and this sequel-ish next year.  Don't know what I'll do there yet.  Maybe publish anyway and if there is or isn't a sequel, no big deal.

Will probably keep going on the lame space opera even though it, too, isn't going anywhere.

I am thinking that, using the terms often-used though not ones I particularly prefer, that I am a pantser when I am able to do humor but a plotter otherwise.  I need an outline otherwise it just goes off the rails which is fine for humorous stuff but not necessarily anything else.  When I was younger, I could plot things out in my head and that could be enough, but now if I do that I'll probably forget it by the end of the week, which is really problematic if it's a Thursday.  So, I need to write stuff down.  Prime example is the name and title of a project I am currently working on.  Was close to a name but that name was too close to something else.  So, I didn't write it down because I hadn't finalized it.  Well, when I got back to the project, I had forgotten both the name I had come up with and whatever it was that it was close to, which meant I had to start from scratch.  So, new name is fine, I think, but now there's that nagging feeling that maybe the first idea was a better direction.

On the drawing front, some of you may remember this one:

I still do a daily drawing as well.  Here is today's:



I show little to no improvement which is why this guy is an alien because his species, while appearing human with large eyes, also shares characteristics with fiddler crabs in that one hand is significantly larger than the other.  You would think he would carry his weapon in his smaller hand and use the larger hand for fighting off enemies, but the space military he serves with didn't design their weapons for people with tiny hands.  Some of his people protested, but they found themselves accidentally expelled from an airlock when they found themselves trapped after following some bad directions to the meeting room and their tiny hands were too small to press the emergency override button and their larger hands too big to press the same button.

Or not.  Regardless, I've been redoing and fine-tuning it.  The initial redo looked too boy-ish, so I tweaked it and now he looks more like a twelve year old than a seven year old, so I guess that's a step in the right direction.  The goal is that he look young, but like in his twenties not his teens.  Oy.

[Lynn]

I don't think he looks like a teenager. I'd say early twenties fits him just fine.

[Post-Crisis D]

I don't think he looks like a teenager. I'd say early twenties fits him just fine.

The redo is where he looks twelve.

[Post-Crisis D]

I was feeling pretty confident in my redo until I did a better side-by-side comparison and--ugh--it's kind of better but much, much worse at the same time.

[Lynn]

I'm trying to restart a daily writing routine. I'll post word counts for some accountability. It's likely to be embarrassing for a while though.

Hahaha...

I am finally getting back into the swing of things. I've been editing a story I meant to publish two years ago and will start writing again today after I finish publishing. My last published work was 22.8 months ago. My burnout or whatever you want to call it finally seems to have come to an end. Thank you lord. I was kind of getting sick of myself. :D

(I've done some minor writing here and there this last two years, but I never could get any momentum up. I've always had cycles of 3-6 months where I just don't want to write at all, but never anything as long as this last one. For the women here, I actually think oncoming menopause really knocked me off my game far more than I expected, so I don't really believe it was burnout in the sense of being sick of writing. I had no idea the hormone changes would affect my mental state to such a degree.)

[Lynn]

Published last week. I tried to start writing the next day but I've ended up spending my time doing tedious follow-up publishing stuff. However, today I think I'll finally get started writing again, because I think I finally got it all done.

But yay! I finally published something after a *very* long break! I was actually worried I'd fall back into that funk I've been in and not get it done this month.

[Post-Crisis D]

I bested my August word count.  Went from under 400 words per day to just over 500.  This was primarily thanks to a last minute push yesterday to hit the 500 word average.  Otherwise, I would have been just under 500 which doesn't sound as impressive as just over 500.

Bested September's word count too.  Went from just over 500 words per day on average to an average of almost 1,300 words per day.  Also beat March's total word count which had been my best month of the year.

Downside is that a good chunk of words were for the lame space opera and I'm thinking it's possible a majority of them will end up being cut.  I have a chapter that's about 70k words which is mostly dialogue.  The first roughly 10k is a group of characters mostly arguing amongst themselves about what to do to stop the bad guy; the remaining 60k are two characters in a dialogue.  If it had a plot of its own, it could possibly be its own book.  Perhaps not a good one but a book.

Upside is that I have 31 short stories to polish up.

[Jeff Tanyard]

I have a chapter that's about 70k words which is mostly dialogue. 

I hope it has lots of asterisk breaks.   

Seriously, though, Sanderson did this sort of thing--a novel-length chapter--in the last WoT book, and it was tedious as hell for this reader.

[Post-Crisis D]

I hope it has lots of asterisk breaks.   

Only between the 10k section and the 60k section.

[notthatamanda]

783.

So basically I haven't written since I published in April. Big dud of a book. 600 page dud. I'm back in school now (Medical Billing and Coding certificate program) and I spent the time from April to July putting my first trilogy on Radish only to have that turn into a big old dud too. My plan had been to continue with my first trilogy on Radish, write up a full season over the summer and release once or twice a week while I wrote another season while going to school. But all the dudness messed with me and I haven't written anything.

So I got the bookbub on the trilogy and yesterday I went hiking with my friend and she basically yelled at me (nicely - she's good at that) to start writing again and I had all these plans for the trilogy characters so I'm going for it.

[Post-Crisis D]

Big dud of a book. 600 page dud.

What genre?

[notthatamanda]

That was book 2 of my WWII book. Post war.

[Lorri Moulton]

783.

So basically I haven't written since I published in April. Big dud of a book. 600 page dud. I'm back in school now (Medical Billing and Coding certificate program) and I spent the time from April to July putting my first trilogy on Radish only to have that turn into a big old dud too. My plan had been to continue with my first trilogy on Radish, write up a full season over the summer and release once or twice a week while I wrote another season while going to school. But all the dudness messed with me and I haven't written anything.

So I got the bookbub on the trilogy and yesterday I went hiking with my friend and she basically yelled at me (nicely - she's good at that) to start writing again and I had all these plans for the trilogy characters so I'm going for it.

Yay!!!  I'm so glad, Amanda.  I was hoping you'd embrace your writing again. 

[notthatamanda]

Thanks, Lorri. 

[Jeff Tanyard]

So I got the bookbub on the trilogy and yesterday I went hiking with my friend and she basically yelled at me (nicely - she's good at that) to start writing again and I had all these plans for the trilogy characters so I'm going for it.

 

[notthatamanda]

616. Oof I'm a little rusty. Maybe some more later. I'm also doing read aloud on my screen play adaption of my first book for entry into a contest in January, that's kind of my top priority right now.

I will say I got my syllabus for one of my classes for my semester that starts next week and I am FREAKING OUT. Just like I freaked out at the beginning of this semester, but I got it done. I'm going to try to spend at least 15 minutes a day writing no matter what.

[Lynn]

660 words yesterday

Best day I've had writing in almost a year. Which is scary but true. :D New book is moving along nicely. Woke up thinking about the story, which is another thing that hasn't happened in a good long time.

[notthatamanda]

669.  Not doing too great on my pledge to write 15 minutes every day so I have to try a little harder on that.

[Lynn]

This last week was probably my best week of writing in nearly a year. That's not saying much so don't get excited for me. 1,710 new words.

But it is good news. I'm writing almost daily again! Next goal is to write every day this week. Sun-Mon. Yesterday I wrote 140 words, but spent most of my time getting familiar with a wip again.

[notthatamanda]

1281. Getting back in shape.

If I have jury duty on Monday I'll take the book with me and write like crazy. I really need to work on my college courses, but I don't want to take the lap top and the course I can get by without the laptop is literally 10 lbs of books so I guess I'll bring the new novel. But I would really like to not have jury duty.

[Lynn]

Today was my highest word count day since 12/2/20, so the improvements continue. I'm happy that writing is going well. I mean, I still want to throw my laptop and pull out my hair about 3/4ths of the time, and I swear I'm writing about 100 words an hour, but I'm a lot happier when I'm writing versus when I'm not writing, so there's that. ;D

[Lorri Moulton]

I have been busy with business rather than writing...but hope to get back to it next week.  I'm working on three related short (shorter) stories that I hope to have finished before Christmas.
Not sure of the word count, but somewhere between short story and novella.  Maybe novelette. 

[Lynn]

I love novella and novelette sized stories. And yet... every time I write a story I end up writing a damn novel. :D

(I do write some shorter fiction, but not nearly as much as I wish, not for lack of trying.)

This month's word count has been much better than the entire earlier part of the year by orders of magnitude. I've logged something every day since the 19th and wrote something most days since the 1st.

I've decided I'm going to write every day for a while. I think I'll try to do it for all of 2022, even if I'm doing other things. A ten or fifteen minute sprint should be plenty to make sure I don't fail.

I'm going to try to work my way up to a small quota for the daily writing, but I'll start with 50, since that's the title of this thread. :-)

[Post-Crisis D]

If I would have written 40 more words yesterday, I would have just beaten October's daily average and 1,314 more words total would have beaten October's daily word count.  As it is, my daily word count average was down from October by 0.10%.

Downside is that a lot of the words I've written this year are for the lame space opera and I suspect I will probably end up editing out a large portion of them.  So, my count of viable words is yet to be determined.

[Lynn]

This last week was slower than the week before. I wrote fewer words and didn't succeed at writing every day, mostly because I forgot I was trying to write every day. (I was doing some proofreading and cover design and they are both writing related so I didn't even think about the actual writing I wasn't doing.)

So...

I restarted the attempt to write every day as of Monday and I'm 3 for 3 right now.

Month-to-date: 1,551

So, my count of viable words is yet to be determined.

I track words daily but only publishable words. So if I delete 5,000 words from a story, I end up with a -5,000 word day. Definitely skews my averages. I finally gave up on them. I no longer track any averages at all. It feels pretty good!

By the time I'm done with a book, I can look at my spreadsheet and the number of words I wrote for a book match the number of words in the book. I'm very glad I can't see how many disappeared.

[Post-Crisis D]

So, my count of viable words is yet to be determined.

I track words daily but only publishable words. So if I delete 5,000 words from a story, I end up with a -5,000 word day. Definitely skews my averages. I finally gave up on them. I no longer track any averages at all. It feels pretty good!

By the time I'm done with a book, I can look at my spreadsheet and the number of words I wrote for a book match the number of words in the book. I'm very glad I can't see how many disappeared.

My daily word count spreadsheet keeps tracks of words written per day.  If I write 50 words Monday, that gets listed as 50 words written for Monday.  If I write 100 words on Tuesday, but delete 50 previously written words, then that gets listed as 50 words written for Tuesday.

Now, if I scrap whole sections, then I base word counts on the new starting word count.  For example, if a story has 50,000 words and I delete 10,000 words, I don't record a -10,000.  Instead, I use a new word count base of 40,000.  Then, I count words added from there.  So, in that case, if I end up with 40,050 words at the end of the day, then that gets recorded as 50 words written rather than -9,950.  But the overall words written would still be at 50,050.

It's imperfect but it works for meeting my daily word counts.

I also have another spreadsheet that tracks completed works and WIPs with current word count, target word count and words remaining.  So, there, if I have a WIP with 50,000 words and then delete 10,000, the current word count gets recorded as 40,000.  When a work is published, the current word count becomes the final word count.  So, I do have a total of published words.

Sometimes I will have a negative for words remaining because the current word count exceeds the target word count.  If a WIP exceeds the target word count, those excess words do not count against my overall target words to be written which keeps my "words to go" count reasonably accurate.

When a book is published, I change the target word count to match the final word count.  That way, I can keep a fairly accurate count of how many words to go before my WIPs are complete.  At my word daily average, it will take me 21 years to finish all my WIPs.

[Lynn]

That way, I can keep a fairly accurate count of how many words to go before my WIPs are complete.  At my word daily average, it will take me 21 years to finish all my WIPs.

Which is why I deleted all the tabs I had in my word count tracker for individual projects. Because I don't need to know that.

It was a cool set of sheets, that told me how many words I needed to write per day to reach a goal word count by a goal date, let me put in my daily word count for every wip I have (each wip had a tab) and even had a column for suggested cumulative word count for the project and the number of words it would take to get caught up if I'd fallen behind.

But the numbers never worked. I always wanted all of them to be finished asap and I would put in these crazy unrealistic dates and then when I would add up the numbers I would need to write like 15,000 words a day to get it all done on time. Sure.

I then went much smaller and just kept up a couple of columns for deadline and words per day on the main page of my spreadsheet which lists all my wips with their current word counts, but it was the same. Last night (literally) I deleted a section of it that showed I needed to write 9,813 words a day for the month of December to get the books I wanted done written by the dates I want them done.

I am just incapable of being realistic when it comes to this stuff.

Better for me to just track what's done and stop thinking about the rest.

I know this kind of stuff helps some people stay on track, but all it does for me is make me want to make ridiculous goals and set unrealistic expectations for myself. 

[Post-Crisis D]

That way, I can keep a fairly accurate count of how many words to go before my WIPs are complete.  At my word daily average, it will take me 21 years to finish all my WIPs.

Which is why I deleted all the tabs I had in my word count tracker for individual projects. Because I don't need to know that.

I only update that list every few months.

[Lynn]

That way, I can keep a fairly accurate count of how many words to go before my WIPs are complete.  At my word daily average, it will take me 21 years to finish all my WIPs.

Which is why I deleted all the tabs I had in my word count tracker for individual projects. Because I don't need to know that.

I only update that list every few months.

I have the main list which gets updated with the total word count for a project every time I write something in a particular doc. That's how it calculates my daily word count.

So updating that daily is necessary for me, unless I have a string of zeroes, in which case I come back after a week or month and go  and copy-paste a bunch in a row in my daily sheet so I'm all caught up. 

The length of my books varies quite a lot and although I have rough ideas in my head of where I'd like them to end, that never seems to happen. I don't know why I keep trying to make projections based on that kind of thing. It's such a waste of time.

Some authors are really good at hitting specific word counts with their book lengths. Maybe I'll get there some day. Probably not.

I keep recreating these types of projections in my spreadsheets though, even though I know they're useless for me. I'm hoping this time my deleted extraneous data and projections will stay deleted. I need to retain what I can of my sanity. 

[Post-Crisis D]

The length of my books varies quite a lot and although I have rough ideas in my head of where I'd like them to end, that never seems to happen. I don't know why I keep trying to make projections based on that kind of thing. It's such a waste of time.

I use it as a guide.  Like my space opera I had a target word count of 125k.  (I think I started at 80k, then 90k, then 100k, etc.)  But then I finished at just under 190k.  So, my spreadsheet shows the book is more than 150% complete.

It does mess up my estimated time to finish projections because if I calculate I need to write x number of words per day to finish my WIPs in y years, that goes out the window if I end up exceeding the target/estimated word count by a large amount.

And that is why I need to go back to doing outlines.  For humorous stuff, I only need an idea of where the book is going.  Tangents and whatnot are fine if they keep the humor.  But, for serious stuff, I need to stay on track.  And, with an outline, I can better hit my word targets.  I mean, a book ends when it ends, but if I have an outline, I can stay on track better and estimate better.  That is, if my goal is 50k, but I'm at 40k when I'm only 1/3 of the way through the outline, then I can adjust and either pare down to stay at around 50k or readjust my target word count to 120k.

[Lynn]

The length of my books varies quite a lot and although I have rough ideas in my head of where I'd like them to end, that never seems to happen. I don't know why I keep trying to make projections based on that kind of thing. It's such a waste of time.

I use it as a guide.  Like my space opera I had a target word count of 125k.  (I think I started at 80k, then 90k, then 100k, etc.)  But then I finished at just under 190k.  So, my spreadsheet shows the book is more than 150% complete.

It does mess up my estimated time to finish projections because if I calculate I need to write x number of words per day to finish my WIPs in y years, that goes out the window if I end up exceeding the target/estimated word count by a large amount.

And that is why I need to go back to doing outlines.  For humorous stuff, I only need an idea of where the book is going.  Tangents and whatnot are fine if they keep the humor.  But, for serious stuff, I need to stay on track.  And, with an outline, I can better hit my word targets.  I mean, a book ends when it ends, but if I have an outline, I can stay on track better and estimate better.  That is, if my goal is 50k, but I'm at 40k when I'm only 1/3 of the way through the outline, then I can adjust and either pare down to stay at around 50k or readjust my target word count to 120k.

Same. I wanted my last novel to end around 50k and then wrote 115k+ for it. :D Although I'll never outline a novel again (probably, I hate to say never but I don't see it happening), it's easy to recognize that it would make hitting a specific word count for a project a bit easier. Especially if you're good at knowing about how many scenes a specific beat in the outline will take.

I just look at all the estimate and know they're in all probability wrong and that frustrates me. So I've decided to quit doing it. Fingers crossed it sticks this time. I need less stress in my life, no kidding.

I do occasionally add up all my wip words and subtract that from the hoped for totals and stare at that number and get even more frustrated when I realize that means finishing them in a year if I can write more than 3x more every day than I do now versus the 3 months I really want them done in and think what is wrong with me?

Haven't figured it out yet.

(Not that I did this now just to check because that would be craaazy, right? )

[Lynn]

406 words yesterday. About to start in on today's. I'm aiming for a couple thousand today, so we'll see how that goes. It's been slow to get my word counts up since I restarted. I've only had one day above 1000 since I restarted.

[Lynn]

65 words yesterday. I had some reading to do and it took a lot longer than I guessed it would. I had to read parts of three different books for a story I'm writing. (The reading is also useful because I'm writing a novel in that series, too.) I did a little writing at the end of the day and that's it. Today will be better for the words.

[Lorri Moulton]

71 words.  I'm really not in the mood to write, but at least I got something done.  I've been so caught up in building my store, starting a newsletter, getting my website updated...I think I've burned myself out for a little while. 
Maybe I'll take a few weeks off for the holidays, then start working on the next book. 

[Lynn]

492 words yesterday.

71 words.  I'm really not in the mood to write, but at least I got something done.  I've been so caught up in building my store, starting a newsletter, getting my website updated...I think I've burned myself out for a little while. 
Maybe I'll take a few weeks off for the holidays, then start working on the next book. 

Holidays are a great time to take time off. They're already so busy anyway.

[Lynn]

1,486 words yesterday.

Took me all day. :D But it's the best word count I've managed in a day in *ages*.

[Lynn]

I've written every day lately except for two days spent on publishing. I wanted to start writing daily even when I have these other things going, but that'll have to wait until January when my daughter goes back to her apartment. I have too much going on, too many people underfoot, and I'm lucky I'm getting anything done at all.

Happy holidays. :D

[diisha392]

About 500 words today. Hoping to hit that goal every day from here to the end of the year, maybe taking Christmas off.

[diisha392]

501 words today (plus one chapter of another writing edited)

[diisha392]

572 words today to finish the first draft of chapter two

[diisha392]

763 words to wrap up chapter 3

[diisha392]

230 words for the start of a new chapter in my main WIP but I also wrote a couple hundred words to wrap up chapter 7 in a side work

[diisha392]

344 new words today along with two chapters of an older WIP edited.

[diisha392]

240 words. 1 chapter done, kind of starting the next.

[diisha392]

103 words done although I'm not sure if I like the direction this new chapter is going.

Also one chapter of older WIP edited.

[diisha392]

121 words to finally finish the rough draft of an episode

[Lynn]

Rocky start to the year, but I've managed to start writing daily again as of Wednesday.

500+ Wednesday
100+ Thursday

[Lorri Moulton]

184 words.  It's a start...

[diisha392]

56 words today...better than 0 right?

Might get a few more in if my tired brain cooperates