As the holidays are upon us and the New Year beckons, I have the penultimate Writing Journal/Random Notes of 2017. The results of last week were… well, just look:
+2.354 words written.
Days writing: 5 out of 7.
Daily writing goals met (500+ words): 3 out of 7 days.
Overall, an improvement over last week. I have all but gotten through the scene that seemed to go on forever. Now, I am getting into the last stretch.
Last night, I hit the 80k word mark for my project. The current overall stats for that:
Current length of first draft: 80,011 (as of the beginning of today).
Current goal for first draft length by Dec. 31, 2017: 83,500-85,000.
[85K is doable if I have the best writing run of the year. Since I’ve got this entire following week off, I have to think it is possible.]
Planned length of first draft: 95,000-99,999.
So… I’m looking forward to the writing run of the year to finish up 2017 in style. Next week, when I do the end-of-year writing journal, I think that I will have to have a follow-up or final tally for at least the last four months (since I began my new writing goal) to see what sort of performance I came up with during that time.
Random Notes:
- It’s going to get harder to be productive the closer I get to the 95,000-99,999-word limit I have in mind for the project. Right now, I still have three vital scenes to write and two other vital scenes to rewrite. Whether I can fit them into the space I have is going to be an interesting thing. There is a good chance one of the subplots I had in mind for the book might be totally cut or drastically reduced to make it in. However, I really believe in this hard and fast rule on the word-count limit, both for commercial viability and the ability to tell a story that is not going to drag excessively.
- Being able to do that and be true to the 500-word a day rule will be another interesting challenge. What I might have to wind up doing is talking into account cutting several “first draft” scenes, if they are not suited for the story that has evolved.
- Don’t ask me about those query letters. I need to get out more.
- Since I do have the week off, I might be able to run a midweek blog post for once.
That’s about all for now. Happy holidays and more later.
Liegois Media 