Writing Wednesday: Taking a Break, Or Not
First, I finished my WiP last week. One day before my latest self-imposed deadline. I had said that once I finished it, I would take a break over the long weekend(and my son’s birthday) before I started planning the next one. Yeah, not so much. I finished the first draft Thursday afternoon and by Thursday night I had decided on and was brainstorming my next project. Apparently I do not know the mean of the term, “break”. I worked on it Friday and a little bit on Saturday, but did actually take a break on Sunday and Monday. Then jumped right back into it Tuesday morning.
I didn’t make out a list of goals last week, but my main one was to finish the first draft. Which I did accomplish. When I checked in on Wednesday, I had written 1310 words. Well, after the ROW80 sprint in the afternoon, a bunch of us decided to get together around 8 that night for some #wordmongering. And I ended the day with 5126 words. Thursday I wrote 4022 words and finished it. It ended up being 88130 words when finished. I’m not sure how happy I am with the ending, but that can always be fixed during revisions.
I ended up writing just a little short of 40,000 words in August. And wrote 28 out of 31 days. That’s an average of about 1321 words for the month, 1415 just counting the days I did write. I know the last two days I wrote had a lot to do with that, and those numbers are quite unusual for me. It took me a total of 83 writing days to finish, although those were over a total of 116 days. Over those 83 days, I averaged about 1060 words a day. So, I know writing 1000 words a day, on average, is definitely doable for me, and I could potentially finish a novel in 90 days. So, I think that will be my goal for the next one.
I already have a good bit of the planning done for the next story. Did some fleshing out of the plot and have dived into the characters’ lives quite a bit. did some character interviews for the first time. Two of the characters were quite open, but the other one had some things he just did not like to discuss. Have some more plotting to do before I will actually start writing though. Hopefully will be done with the plotting by the end of next week though, but we’ll see how that goes.
I also started reading The Fall of Billy Hitchings by Kirkus MacGowan and finished it last night. Now, I’m starting to read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Well, I haven’t actually started it yet, but have it open on one of my e-reader apps on my phone.
Goals for next week:
- Finish applying the snowflake method to the newest WiP
- work up a blueprint for the WiP
- Be halfway through Gone Girl