As I head into the home stretch on CROSSLINE, book number 2, I find myself wanting to finally be done, to get the point where I can say to myself, yep, this is it. First draft is complete. But as with many things, the closer we get to obtaining what we want, the more illusive it can seem. So to give myself an extra jolt, I challenged myself this weekend.
Typically, a good writing day–or what’s considered a productive writing day–is knocking out 1,000 words in a sitting. The idea being tAs I head into the home stretch on CROSSLINE, book number 2, I find myself wanting to finally be done, to get the point where I can say to myself, yep, this is it. First draft is complete. But as with many things, the closer we get to obtaining what we want, the more illusive it can seem. So to give myself an extra jolt, I challenged myself this weekend.
Typically, a good writing day–or what’s considered a productive writing day–is knocking out 1,000 words in a sitting. The idea being that if you can write 1,000 words a day for 90 days, you’ll have 90,000 words. And that’s a book. Right now I’m at about 75,000 words, so I’m close, but I’m not there yet.
Saturday was a good day. I indeed knocked about 1,200 words, so I did my job. But for Sunday, I summoned my inner Emmeril–[i]bam![/i]–and cranked it up a notch. My challenge was to write 5,000 words in one day. Yep. 5,000, or five times the word count for a normal "good" day.
When Sunday came along I was at the desk by 10:30 a.m., and with Liz out in the city visiting friends, I had the apartment to myself. No distractions, no excuses. And so I went.
Of course, the big question is: did I actually write 5,000 words?
In a word – no.
But … but … I did write almost 2,000 words, so even though I fell far short of my goal, I still wrote twice as much as on a normal good day. I feel pretty good about it, too. Going into Sunday I really thought I had a shot at 5,000 words, but as the day wore on and I realized I needed to do more plotting–just hammer out the sequence of events–than to work on the fine print, I found it deep in my heart to let myself off the hook.
It may not have been 5,000, but I’ll take 2,000 words any day.
