Drawing from the Well
Funny story. I went to copy the framework I’ve used for this section and realized that it no longer applies.
Why is that, you may be asking? Did I quit writing? Am I changing things up? Did the project change?
No on all counts.
It doesn’t apply anymore because I finished Book Two!
This month has been an amazing ride and I want to go into detail about it in the Well Chat below so here I’ll just say that the first draft is complete. The work isn’t done, obviously, because I have a litany of editing rounds to apply but it is so rewarding just to finish. See below for my entire retrospective on March and my prospective look at April.
Filling the Well
The Last Necromancer: 100% (Book 17 of 36 for #ProjectBookworm2020)
Her Majesty’s Necromancer: 100% (Book 18 of 36 for #ProjectBookworm2020)
Beyond the Grave: 100% (Book 19 of 36 for #ProjectBookworm2020)
The Librarian: 17%
Society of Wishes: 5%
So I chewed through the first three of TEN books in C.J. Archer’s Necromancer series. The first two books were exciting but book three bored me. I’m kind of glad that books 4 through 10 aren’t available on Hoopla because I expect that I would still feel compelled to read them to get the whole story, especially to see if the series redeemed itself by the end. Book 3 was very much a pivot book to move the story from one phase to another. It felt unnecessary. I’m taking a lesson here to make sure that each book in my own series is necessary.
I’m reading Society of Wishes but it’s slow. With my focus on writing and everything going on with the COVID-19 pandemic, Society of Wishes has been harder to find time to read. It’s an interesting read so far. I just need more time to sit and turn the pages.
As for the Librarian, it’s a fun romp already. It’s so freeing after the Necromancer books to have something a little more contemporary and free-wheeling. (Use of “free” twice in one sentence – not so good). Plus it has time travel so that ticks one of my boxes and Piper Goodeve is the narrator which ticks another. So I’m in for the duration as well as the sequel, The Archivist. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Well Chat
Now for your blog meal.
Let’s start by talking some numbers:
As you can see, the first draft of Book Two is complete. Below that is my daily progress graph. The green line is my 1k-a-day goal. I blew past that most days in March. Granted, I didn’t start writing until the 9th but that only makes my accomplishments all the more significant. The spike in the middle is actually two days but I rolled them together for my 10k day. I finished the 10k after midnight so that’s why it’s not as high as yesterday’s near-8k day (I finished well after midnight for that too, I just didn’t split it out). This was a lot of early mornings and late nights but the payoff is immeasurable to me.
Next is the day by day total. I show this because it shows my 7-day total as well as almost every writing day last month. The value all the way to the right is the 7-day. I hit a spike around my 10k day (3/21-3/22) and it started going even higher from there until my second spike on the 31st. I almost cracked 20k on 3/23 but that made it all the more satisfying when I did it last night. And there were some days that I wasn’t successful but you know what you don’t see there? A goose egg. No zeros for three weeks. Even on the 14th when I only wrote 56 words, I made sure that I wrote SOMETHING.
That seemed to make all the difference: the freedom to just write something. Sarra Cannon’s adage of “It’s okay to suck.” allowed me to just put the story to the page. I never realized how much pressure I put on myself to put the right words on the page. And that’s considering that I already KNEW the right words wouldn’t come on the first pass. The pomodoro method created a time limit where my mindset was to get as many words on the page before time ran out. And you know what? I started getting my daily goal done in 25 minutes. So I did more. I went farther. More sprints made more words. And that led to…
Yeah, I wrote just over 51,000 words in March. Huh…I just realized that if this were November, I would have won NaNoWriMo. That’s never happened before. Looking back at the work I did on Book One, the best month I ever had was 36,561 in August ’16. I killed that by more words than I wrote in December ’19 (I know that’s a weird statistic to throw out there but to think that I crammed more than two months worth of writing into 3 weeks astounds me).
So what did I learn from this? There were a couple of things. One, I (just like you) am only limited by the amount of work I’m willing to do. I know without a doubt that I could have done more on some days. I’m not beating myself up over it (clearly I ran out of book anyway 😛 ) but the POTENTIAL is there. Had I started on 3/1 or been stricter on my sprint mornings I could have written 60k or 75k in a month. Maybe more. That blows my mind.
And it leads to the second thing I learned. This gave me a glimpse into a possible future for me. You should all know by now that my dream is to one day see enough success from this to quit my job. I love my job. I love my team. But being a full-time author is THE dream for me. This shows me that if I put my mind to it, really threw myself into fast-drafting (as Lyra Parish puts it), I could draft a book in a month. That’s pretty exciting. If I could tighten up my planning, editing, and production processes (I don’t even HAVE a production process yet since I’m still unpublished), I could actually release multiple books per year. I could actually do this for real. That’s deeply encouraging.
So where do I go from here? Well, drafting is done so editing is next. I’m taking today essentially off to write this blog and get the draft printed. Yes, my first round of editing is on paper. There’s something about holding it in my hand and reading and making notes manually that gives me a physical feel for my book. That allows me to do a better job on subsequent editing rounds. Plus, this first round will be my roughest (as in least-polished) ever. It’s going to be a straight extract from yWriter including scene descriptions, goal cycle, and notes. That will allow me to remember the bits I intended to thread in as well as things I realized while drafting so I can go back and fix them. It’s not going to be a quick process but I’m really excited about it.
Additionally, there’s a 10k write-in on 4/11 so I’m going to try and jump on that. I don’t know what I’m going to write for now but I have a few ideas. I’ve got some free stuff in mind that I need to work on so maybe one or two of those.
I’m also going back to Book One to start working on some of the nuts and bolts to lead to publishing. I’ve got a list and first up is one of the most-fun parts: the cover.
That should keep me very busy through April. I’m still going to use the Pomodoro method to work on edits in the mornings. That habit has felt great. I’ll track through a new, tweaked spreadsheet based on my drafting tracking spreadsheet. And now that I’m thinking about that I’m just as excited.
For now, I’ll leave you to your Hump Day April Fool’s Day. I hope you’re doing well through this crisis time in our world. We’re good here it’s just hard with my wife’s business essentially shut down and the kids home gearing up for school. We’re blessed that those are our biggest problems. Stay safe and stay healthy out there.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG