Category: writing

Week 1 results of my writing goals are in. It’s Sunday evening after child bedtime, and I have 1949 on the week. This is with only writing 4 of the 7 days. I’ve decided on the weekends, instead of writing from 6:55 to 7:25, I will write from 7:25 until whenever Punkin wakes up. This morning it was at 7:26, so I hadn’t even finished connecting my wireless keyboard before she was up and at ’em. Luckily, I was still able to write a few hundred words later in the morning while she watched Avengers Assemble on Netflix.

My days were 386, 551, 570, and 442. I am going to write a few sentences toinight and as Cory Doctorow and others suggest, end in the middle of one. I could probably write a few hundred more this evening without problem, but this is a marathon not a sprint. I’m going to save some calories for future weeks when it gets harder.

So, count week 1 as a success. On to week 2!

As discussed on my soon to publish podcast and on the Kindle Chronicles podcast, I am holding myself to some new writing goals. When I wake up, I go immediately to the keyboard and write for 30 minutes with the goal of getting 281 words of first draft fiction written a day, every day. This doesn’t count blogging or any of the other words I type in a day, only potentially publishable fiction.

If you multiply this out, I’m shooting for 2,000 words a week. If I can do this each and every week, that’s a novel or a novel equivalent every year. The goals are so modest as to be trivial and thus far have been quite achievable.

I only started this on Thursday, so I have three days under my belt. Those have been 386, 551, and 570 so I have just over 1500 on the week, even with the week having a three day head start on me. For any week I fall short of the 2,000 words I will spend my Sunday evening making them up but it looks like that might not be common. Here’s hoping.

I think as part of my public accountability/working in public, each Sunday evening I will post here what the weekly word count was coming into the evening and whether or not I have makeup work to do. Maybe no one cares that much, but holding myself to account helps keep it all working. Here we go!