Last week I increased my per-day minimum to 2000 words. I’ve done that because for the next two months I have less distractions than usual, and therefore more time than usual to do both the money-earning technical writing, and the fiction.
I calculate that if I hit that minimum each and every day, including weekends, until my (very welcome, actually) distractions come back, I’ll end up with a solid first draft of the Augusta book.
So this week, yes, I did 2000 words a day, for 14,000 for the week, for a total of 41,000. It wasn’t easy (particularly the last 500 words or so); I didn’t have any grand flights of thousands of easy words spinning out to fantastic, knitted together, scenes. Plus, for the last little while, I’ve been re-writing those mid-guided scenes so I’ve really been writing more than my minimum just to keep the word count from going backwards.
It was a matter of sitting there, sometimes till late at night, until disciplined-self convinced procrastinating-self that we weren’t going to be do anything else until those words were done.
The nice thing about having extra time now is that I can allow a long time for this process to work. The danger, obviously, is that allowing a long time for it to work can become a time-wasting habit. However, I do believe that as the weeks go by, reaching 2000 words a day, even amongst my distractions, will be the stronger habit, and the time spent gazing out the window at the neighbour’s pet rabbit (it’s the size of a terrier and fetches balls like a terrier, too) will diminish: the more you have to do, the more you can get done.
Besides, if I can’t go to bed until I’m done, you bet I get done…
