Blog Drought
While California is currently having a terrible drought, I’ve also had one of my own in regards to posting to this blog. My last post was nearly three months ago so I’m feeling rather guilty. I guess in some way, I didn’t want to add to this blog as I didn’t think I had a lot of progress to report and that was a sense of shame for me.
As I look at my last post, I’ve only progressed another 15.6% towards completion of the first draft. Not particularly impressive for nearly three months of time gone by, but I’ve been thrown some curve balls recently at the day job. This has really sapped my attention and much of my time so I didn’t have a lot of extra unstressed moments to write, and when I did have time, I didn’t have much enthusiasm for it. I can’t really say much about the distraction, but I don’t feel guilty for reacting this way. Recently,… things appear that they may be getting better though, so I’ve been trying to step up my writing efforts.
My next goal is to hit the 50% completed mark. I’m fairly close to this, but still need to put in the hours. Speaking of that, I’ve added another two cells to my writing spreadsheet. One adds up the time I’ve spent in actual writing so far, which comes out to 81.2 hours. If broken down into an 8 hour work day, that would be a little over 10 days. The second cell uses my average words per hour calculations based on recent writing sessions and projects that I can complete this first draft in about 21 1/2 days. Needless to say, though, I need to pick up the pace.
I feel more confident that I’ll be able to increase my average words per hour count and get my first draft done sooner. I’m in a very exciting part of the book which is fun to write, but also challenging as my characters are being pushed to the limit. I’m hoping others will enjoy the story I am putting together but I have to complete it before I’ll ever be able to find out if they do.
I’m trying not to look too far ahead, but this will be only the first draft of this novel. When this is done, after a brief celebration on my part, there will still be the second and third drafts to work on. That won’t take as much effort, I’m hoping, as I’ll be tweaking and changing what I’ve already written, but it will still be a large block of work ahead for that stage of this project.
But for now, 50% is my goal. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. (PETA,… I’m only kidding and would never eat an elephant) So hopefully I’ll chug along at a better pace, but I’ll try to be better about documenting it here. I don’t want to take too much time away from the novel, but will definitely check in on the Blog. Particularly when I hit the 50% mark!
July 17th, 2014:
Current Novel Word Count: 37,236 Words
Percentage towards 1st Draft Goal: 43.8%