Progress! I Have Progress to Report!

Words from sprints
Monday – 526 Wandering Wizards
Tuesday – 675 Magic II
Wednesday – 445 Magic II
Thursday – 731 Magic II
Friday – 529 Magic II
Total: 2,906
Blog Posts: 1797
Editing: 1 hour, 5 minutes

I wasn’t sure about breaking down the word sprints (and FYI, it’s only a word war if you’re writing against someone; if you’re just writing against the clock then it’s a word sprint) but I found the range of wordage kind of interesting.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably thinking pretty much the same thing I am. Wow, 2900 words for a whole week isn’t really that great. But it’s better than I’ve been doing all year, so shut up. Plus a word sprint is 30 minutes, so those daily totals are for 30 minutes of writing each.

The weekend was supposed to be for editing, and as you can see I only did a little over an hour’s worth of it. I’ve been trying to adjust to a new medication and it seriously knocks the stuffing out of me for at least a day, which was Saturday, and then Sunday I kind wrote over 2300 words (which will be added to next week’s total) instead of editing.

What can I say? The ending of the new WIP I’m working on came to me as I was falling asleep Saturday night and it was good enough that I remembered most of it in the morning.

And you notice I’m calculating my editing by time spent instead of pages finished? It just seemed to make sense. And I have to admit to being a little curious as to how much time I spend editing something. I’ll bet the total time when I’m done will staggering.

To help in this I downloaded a nifty little program called TraxTime. With it you can log the amount of time you spend on your different projects, whether it’s writing or editing. Not only will it keep track of each day’s progress, it’ll keep a running total for you too and you can generate reports, if you’re so inclined. You can try it yourself for free for 30 days, just go HERE  and if you want to keep it, it’s only $39.00.

I hope you also noticed I fixed my progress bars to the right. As you can see, I took Wandering Wizards all the way back to the beginning. I’m combining both the old words and new as I see fit, which is going to make keeping track of the new words a little problematic. One of my problems last week was that I wrote down my daily word counts, but forgot to make note of which WIP they were for, so when it came to updating my progress bars I was a little uncertain. However, I’ve made a chart to fill in on a daily basis, so hopefully that won’t be a problem any more.

I would have liked to have added more words to Wandering Wizards last week, but what can I say? Sometimes it’s nice to work on something completely different, and the words just seem to be coming fast and furious for Magic II. So fast, in fact, I kind of wish I could have saved it for NaNo – I would have rocked NaNo with it. Oh, well. There’s always Magic III. ;-)

This week: carry on and keep writing!

The Secret Is In the Timing

No great epiphanies this week I’m afraid, just some kinda interesting stuff going on. Probably more interesting to me than you, but hear me out and you can decide for yourself.

I actually spent more time reading blogs than playing games last week, and while it might not seem like much of an improvement (because I really should have been writing) at least there’s a chance I might learn something from a blog. There’s not much that can be learned from a game, other than the fact that on-line games cheat.

Anyway…on a whim I checked out a few of the early posts on my other blog, and by early I mean when I first started it ten years ago. Man, those were the days! The posts were short and random, and I had about three works in progress going at the same time.

One of those WIPs was something called “Magic” and I had no idea what it was referring to. Nowhere did I give enough detail as to what it might have been, just word counts and progress reports. And there was nothing titled “Magic” in my old files. It took several more posts before I finally had an “Ah ha!” moment that let me know what I’d changed it to and then all of a sudden I started thinking up all these details for the sequel that never got past the “thinking about it” stage.

So Friday, the illustrious Jamie had the day off (she had Thursday off as well, but the torpedoing of that day is her story to tell) so I challenged her to a word war. We actually did two of them, 30 minutes each, and I was pretty amazed at how much you can write in 30 minutes. The first one I started Magic 2 (for want of a better title) for 816 words, and the second I worked on Wandering Wizards for another 689. Pretty good for someone struggling to get her blog posts done on time, eh?

But Jamie and I both agreed that the secret is in the timing. It is far easier to accomplish respectable word counts when you tell yourself, “Okay, I’m going to write without stopping for 30 minutes” than it is if you set yourself a goal of X number of words.

That being said, I didn’t get any writing done on the weekend, but yesterday, despite being interrupted a couple of times, I still managed 526 words. And seeing as my daily goal is 500 words, that’s a pretty good way to start my day.

Of course that’s also why this post is a day late. Yesterday I sat outside on the deck for my breakfast, which kind of put me way behind everything else, and this post kept getting moved down the priority list. But, today I decided to get this done first, then do my word sprint, and now I’m done so off I go.

Look at it this way, I’ll finally have some words to report on next Monday’s post! ;-)