Week Six: Momentum

If you missed my previous post, I have written what I estimate to be half (248 pages) the length of the novel based on how I've broken down the plot/scene outline.

This past week started as a great week.  I was totally psyched about meeting my goal to reach the halfway point.  Monday alone I wrote 14 solid pages.  But by Friday, I was crawling to 7 pages.  I tried working on Saturday and couldn't concentrate more than an hour when I expected (and needed) to work, editing the first half and writing a fight scene, all day.  I can blame Saturday's problems partially on my environment.  I'm particular about where I can work, and I had to move to the public library on Saturday and there are just so many books there...

All told:
Week Total Hours: 37
Total Hours for Writing Novel: 30
Total Pages Written:  49 (1 less than goal)
Total Hours for Editing Novel: 2
Total Pages Editted: 2.25
Pages Per Hour (Writing): 1.63
Pages Per Hour (Editing): 1.125

Due to my early week surge, my pages per hour for writing is about where it should be, but if I'm only "editing" at 1 and an eighth page an hour (editing here pretty much meaning copy-paste - possibly selectively - from one document to another), it's going to take me a very, very long time to finish this...  My 13 week goal, which we are heading into the seventh week of (scary!), includes my very, very rough first draft, an equally rough "working" draft which might contain a couple variations of the same scene from which to choose, and a tidier third draft from which to jump into future/final drafts.  I have seven weeks to complete two and a half approximately 496 page drafts.  Exciting.

Mostly what I need to focus on now is not losing momentum.  It's already started, as evidenced by this past week's slow decline.

No Quote of the Week this week, sorry to say.  This is coming up a little late as it is, and I need to post now, instead of searching for something fun.  Look out later this week for a new weekly topic I'll be posting!

HALFWAY THERE!

It's happened.  I've broken down the book into 6 major/equal parts, and I just finished the 3rd, which means I'm halfway there at 5.5 weeks into my 13 week project!

This half is 248 pages exactly (for the moment).  I'll be spending my Saturday going through my first edits of this draft - mostly just working on transitioning from scene to scene.  For the rest of the week, I'm full steam ahead for the second half -except for writing this blog post rather than continuing on the scene I've started because I'm to eager to concentrate.  I also maybe shouldn't have pushed myself with that second pot of coffee.

I have written 248 pages and ~72,000 words in approximately 35 days (give or take for sick/make-up days) and 5.5 weeks, which means: (numbers are rounded)
Per week my average page count is: 45.1
Per week my average word count is: 13,091
Per day my average page count is: 7.1
Per day my average word count is: 2,057

Unfortunately, that means I'm writing under-goal, since I'm trying to write at 10 pages per day.  But I won't get too weepy about it:  I'm kicking ass!

At the rate I'm going, I think I will have written all the scenes I need written by halfway through the 12th week, and I'll edit for the last week and a half instead of write.  If I can step up my game and get to writing at or above my goal like I was in the first couple weeks, I should be done in the 10th or 11th week, and I'll have 2 or 3 weeks to edit.

Of course, after that, I don't plan on considering the novel "done" in any way.  I'm tentatively calling my end product my Final Rough Draft.  I'm sure it will go through several edits after, but I want something complete ad cohesive at the end of these 13 weeks.  When we get closer to the end, I'll discuss my plans for the future of this blog.

As always, I appreciate your support!  Sending you love!

Week Five: Utter Failure

Just thinking about my weekly stats makes my head hurt.  I was well under my 50 page goal.  Granted, it's not really my fault when my head decides it wants to mimic the pain from a torture scene in 24, but I'm still bummed about it.

Still, I'm extraordinarily close to the halfway point in the novel.  My projection for it is Wednesday the 22nd, and I plan on writing through the evening until I get there.  After today I'll probably have about 30 more pages to write, based on the scenes I know need to happen and how long they tend to be.

Once I get to the halfway point, I'm going to start giving more information about the novel itself.  I don't think I've given a summary since week one.  I'm thinking about doing mid-week Character Spotlights; how does that sound to you?  I've also been working on another related project that I plan to premiere in a sister blog by the end of the summer.

I'm still lacking in the Facebook area.  It's awful.  I feel so disconnected from my friends not in my immediate physical space.  Also, I can't share this blog there, so I appreciate your efforts to do so!

Quote of the Week: Fail
I didn't write for two days, so there really wasn't much from which to choose.  I know I said I'd try for two this week, but c'mon.  Three days worth of material.  Plus, this is a long quote.

This quote is actually of a win for the main character, Nico, but a fail for the one she's dealing with.

"“You think you can kill me?” Nico asked
“Did you happen to notice how many people were in the room out there?”
54 patrons: half Prienvian, quarter Dwarven, and the rest a mix of Elven, Human and Hakathan. Plus the Prienvian barkeep. Nico liked challenges. Kept fight in the blood. “Nope.”
“Over fifty. And they’re all waiting for me to give them a signal.” The petite criminal giggled again. “So, let’s not be silly and do something you’ll regret in your afterlife.”
“Oh, I never allow myself to do something I’ll regret.”"

PS.  Sorry this is late getting up again this week.  I woke up late and didn't want to start writing late.
PPS.  Great start to this week, by the way.  :-)

Week Four: Crisis and Frustration

I did it.  Over 200 pages written in four weeks.  I think I previously posted that this would make me ahead of schedule, but it actually puts me right on schedule if my goal is to write 10 pages a day, which it is.  Still, I am pretty proud of myself, and I expect that I will be half way through the novel by the end of this coming week or middle of next.  I might even add a Saturday writing session this week to make sure that is met.

Well, this past week has seen a lot of frustration for me.  I had to take my planning to the next level and brainstorm specific scenes.  This wasn't a problem in and of itself, but it was a solution to the problem that I had no idea where I was taking a particular character, and it certainly wasn't a perfect solution.  The most painful source of frustration for me this past week, however, had nothing to do with the book.  Three of my accounts have been hacked, including Facebook, and I have been locked out entirely from all of them.  I've spent days, including several hours I should have been writing, trying to recover them.  No luck thus far.

When I was writing this blog this morning, I wrote about how although I've been mostly meeting my daily goal, I am failing to keep to my schedule of free writing from 9-9:30 and from 1-1:30 and novel writing from 9:30-12 and 1:30-4ish.  One of the things I cited was that I'm often too energetic or too exhausted and I get distracted by the need to exercise or take a nap.  I did free write before my morning session, and it certainly had the effect I want for it: clearing my mind of other stories by writing them down before I begin my novel writing.  Of course, I proceeded to take a nap my entire afternoon session.  I probably wouldn't have if I remembered to turn my phone off silence so I could hear the alarm I set for myself.  I do want to cut down on napping in general, but it's extraordinarily difficult to have any success writing or even look at the computer screen when I have a soul-splitting migraine.  I guess I'll just have to find a balance with that.

Just a reminder that you can Comment without having a Blogger account, Follow the blog through your Blogger account, Subscribe by email or RSS feed, and Share the posts on Facebook or Twitter (which I would be quite grateful for since I can't post on Facebook for at least a couple weeks).  Also, I'm on Twitter: @BookwyrmFCP.

Sadly no Quote of the Week this time around; I was having difficulty with finding a good quote earlier today and right now I'm still reeling from my migraine.  Maybe I'll post two next time.

/Headdesk

So I had this awesome post all typed, but unfortunately, Blogger decided to have a bunch of errors, and I lost most of it.  I'll try posting either during my lunch break or after writing today.

Here's a fun video to entertain you until then: Roll a D6.

Planning Continued

After a fairly unsuccessful day yesterday of trying to write scenes for this week's character, I decided to take some time this morning planning out possible scenes.  As I've written previously, I'm approaching planning cautiously, but this morning's session seemed to really work -

I've got a general idea for a dozen plus scenes, and my writing today definitely showed me that the planning was not going to interfere with spontaneous creation when a new scene cropped up, bridging the planned scenes.  Plus, despite the time I took out to plan during the morning session, I still exceeded my writing goal and broke the halfway mark on my 11th page.

This was a short update, I know, but I haven't much to say other than that I am proud of the results.

As a final piece of this update, I encourage you to comment if you have any response to this blog.  Because when someone has commented in the past, it brightens my day a little.  Since someone has asked me if being logged in is necessary, you do not have to be a member of Blogger to comment - Google accounts, Open IDs, Livejournal, and AIM s/ns are all ways to sign in for commenting - but I don't allow anonymous comments in order to cut back on spambots.  You can also follow the blog through your Google account, RSS feed or email.

I hope to hear your thoughts soon!

Week Three: Planning

One of these days I'll get better at planning when I'm going to write these blog posts.  Until then, I'll be concentrating all my planning energy on the novel.

I am planner.  I can schedule and plan things to death, but I tend to get caught up in the planning too much to actually execute the results.  So, when I decided to write this summer, I vowed to do as little planning as possible and only write until I couldn't go anymore.  As I've previously said, I've been planning this in my head for years, so despite my lack of planning in writing, I've known what I've wanted to write.  However, for the past two weeks, I have been working with three characters all in different places in the world, doing different things.  This week, I hit the time in the novel when their paths first cross.  Now, instead of planning about what will happen five chapters from now, I'm having to work out the logistics of perspective and the characters' individual storylines intersecting.

This is what led to my "first manuscript draft," which I wrote about in the mid-week update.  I combined all the scenes I've written over the past weeks in chronological order into one document.  This has led me to develop an entirely new structure for the novel that I hadn't been planning on, and with a structure, I now have a much better idea of when and where certain characters need to be interacting and in whose perspective all the scenes should be, even though I don't have a list of all the scenes I'll be writing - just the absolutely necessary ones.

Since this is following a post with all my stats, etc, I don't have much to write this time around.  The plan for the following week is to stay with one particular character the entire time.  She took a turn for crazyville on Friday when a sub-sub-plot quickly became her main characterization/character motivation.  I have no idea where this is going, which is exciting and, I guess, means I'm doing a good job at only planning what I absolutely have to.

Quote of the Week: Starting Point

As I've blogged before, this undertaking might be the most insane thing I've ever committed to.  And now that I've begun a bit of planning, it seems both slightly more and slightly less of an ordeal.  In this, a hunter, D'rina, has left her comfort zone to research a peculiar incident she witnessed while hunting.  She is now utterly surrounded by research materials.

"D’rina had no idea where to start. The undertaking suddenly overwhelmed and crashed down on her. She should have kept to hunting what could be stalked. 


She grabbed the scroll from the top of the closest stack to her.  [...]


As she unrolled the scroll and began to read, D’rina hoped the librarian didn’t mind that she might be there for forever."

Mid-Week Update

It's not technically the "middle" of the week when I'm posting on a Thursday, but it's not my usual post-week wrap-up, so I'm sticking with that sentiment for the term.

It's almost the end of my third week of writing.  Un-frikkin-believable.  I'll write much more here over the weekend when I have the time, but for now, I just wanted to update everyone on some amazing progress that I catalogued today.

Technically, I work 35 hour weeks.  32 of those are meant to be strictly writing, 27 strictly writing my novel.  That's how my daily schedule reads.  So, today should mark 378 hours of writing Prophecy.  Considering these are best laid plans... Well, you read my post last week and know the trouble I've been having focusing and the like.

Today during my editing session, I compiled everything I have written thus far in those 370-ish hours.  You see, I open a fresh Word Doc daily to write, and I save each day's work separately that way.  Today I put together my first manuscript draft, splicing together the character perspectives I've been writing in.

150 pages.

This is actually right on-track.  My goal is to write 10 pages a day, 50 pages a week.  What it's actually coming out to is closer to 11 pages per day (though some days, like yesterday, I've written nearly 15).

Weeks Completed: (almost) 3
Weeks Remaining: 10 (plus a day)
Total Number of Hours Spent Writing Novel: somewhere between 365 and 378
Total Number of Pages: 150 (almost exactly)

To borrow a phrase: So excite!