Chapter 23 of *False Perceptions* is complete at 3472 words, bringing the book’s total thus far to just over 60K. Still, I’m not quite meeting my word count goals of 2K per day with yesterday’s 1695 and today’s 1777. Are my goals unrealistic? Or is it just that I’m busier with other things than usual? It IS busy. I’ve just spent over an hour actually WORKING, if you can imagine. Paperwork and orders and fun stuff like that. Occasionally I do have to organize my guys. They are just about done the 1800 square foot new house and needed to make sure everything was lined up for next week.
I’ll decide next week if my daily goals are completely unreasonable and need adjusting. It doesn’t hurt to push myself, but it’s most helpful if the goals are at least within the realm of possibility. I tend to write by scene rather than word count, and I think that is one of the problems. Except for a few shorty scenes here and there, scenes for me average 1500-1700 words. I don’t quite know how to make them be 2K each! And I don’t like not finishing what I start. Early on there were too many times I’d sit back down to write and not remember where I was going with a scene. I like the thoughts to be complete before I put them away.
If I decide to just accept that about my writing, then my average weekly count goes to 7.5-8K. The other option is to add a writing day at home on the weekend, or try and do at least one double day in a week.
Aargh. Do you have any idea how long it’s even taken me to write this much blog entry? Half an hour. I think I’ll settle for one scene a day for now and consider my goals met. (Unless they’re shorty add-in ones!)
What else do you want to know about life in my little world? I haven’t had five minutes to put together to deal with ideas in Shann’s story since Monday. I am NOT used to being this busy.
Hey Ho, Val! Good to get a chance to catch up on your blog! (And my own is updated again finally, after a rather unusual week.) You HAVE been busy! Moving cattle, creating worlds, working at the shop, writing, writing, writing. Good going! As to your word count goal debate, my comment would be that you MIGHT want to look at whether or not your word count goals are driving you forward to get more high quality work done at the level you want, or rather, are causing you to possibly compromise on quality and enjoyment in the writing process to meet an arbitrary number of words each day. I too, had the same problem with the scene issue — wanting to finish the scene, but having it fall too far above the word count or too far below the word count. And it caused me a lot of problems, until I just threw out the word count issue. For me, I’ve found that word count goals affect me in the second way, and I do much better with amount of TIME SPENT each day type of goal. That too creates the issue of whether to keep going beyond the time target to finish a scene, but at least you don’t have to be constantly glancing at your word count and trying to arbitrarily shove the scene to size to match the day’s word count goal. But as you know, for others, word count goals work most marvelously, and help them produce high quality words consistently. It sounds like you’re getting a bit burned out with it, but reality is that you are having an unusually taxing week! Maybe, on a week when you’re not moving the bull and cattle around, things will slide together much better! (I love your farming details. I would love to live on a farm like yours, although I know it is much hard work!)
You had to WORK?
LOL
I think since your scenes tend to an average length (and you do like finishing those scenes) that a scene-per-day goal is what you’re looking for. Don’t you hate leaving things hanging? Yet, considering your average scene you would nearly always have a scene fragment hanging at the end of the 2,000 word count. (At least until day and wordcount would happen to coincide and you would have two scenes done in a day.)
I think you have a harder time getting going with half-done stuff. (from long association, LOL) Am I misreading you? Needless to say, if you consider a portion finished I’m more likely to be reading it that evening, so this is also selfish of me. 😉
Yes, I know I need to get back to you on the last two parts…and I WILL finish that crit for you. Love ya.