One of my great unstarted projects for the last five years has been to crack on with writing my first(ish) novel. This week I finally laid down my first words …
Category: Write Page 4 of 6
One of my unplanned goals for last year was to sort out my writing habit: to get the point where I was writing regularly and, most importantly, making time to do that writing. Going into this year I made the very conscious decision to develop a structured workflow and apply that to my writing projects.
A quick update on my writing efforts for the last month of 2014.
This year I’m planning to up my blogging game (and I’m dragging a few friends along too). To help me in this endeavour I’m attempting to take a slightly more organised approach with my blog and I figured it might be useful to share what I’m doing.
I’ve been slack at providing the promised updates on my writing activities. Fortunately, my negligence means that I can wrap up my last three months’ of updates in a neat, tidy, ‘Spring’ brand package. It’s almost as if I had planned it all along …
Back at the end of June I made the decision to formally start logging my word counts. Because I know you’ll all be deeply fascinated by this, here’s a post about how I do it.
A quick update on how well I fared with the Morning Shift during August.
So I’ve just totted up the totals for my August writing log (and the blog post on that will follow this week) and it seems to me that a monthly writing update would be a far better idea than a weekly one, as previously threatened. Since I’ve already missed about three planned blog posts since the last one, it also means you’re far more likely to actually get an update.
Anyway, August was going well: you need only look at my last Morning Shift update to find out why and how. Typically, however, things start to go a bit awry at the end of the month: I could feel myself coming down with something during that last week, then my youngest decided he wanted to start getting up at about 6:30am instead of 7:30am. Neither of these factors helped make the mornings particularly productive. In the end I did come down with flu in the first week of September, but that can wait for next month’s update.
Nevertheless, August (and I’m cheekily included the end of July as well) was still a fantastically productive month for me: I wrote over 10,000 words and edited 6,400. Specifically:
- Completed the first draft of a new short story, Needle, at the end of July
- Wrapped up the final draft of another new(ish) short story, The Empty Room) in the first week of August – that’s the 6,404 words of editing
- Wrote the complete first draft of a new short story, Drones, during the rest of the month. That came in at just under 6,000 words.
- Wrote two blog posts
Now let’s see if I can come anywhere near that for September.
Three months later, how am I finding the morning shift?
After a typically tough wake-up, it feels like things might be settling down. Or is this just the eye of the hurricane?
They say it takes an average of 66 days for a new behaviour to become habit. I’m on day seven. Bugger.