Yesterday’s post was a breakthrough of sorts.
It helped me to realize that my writing challenge can (and should) be accomplished with more than just blog posts. This site exists to give me a platform for my fiction writing, but if writing content for the site keeps me from writing fiction – it sort of defeats the purpose. I have to find a happy medium between writing usable and/or entertaining content and writing fiction for eventual publication.
With that in mind, today’s writing project was pretty simple – work on my first novel, which has been languishing unattended for months.
In fact, my previous estimate for completing the novel was November 2012! I almost choked when I opened Scrivener today and saw that on the writing target tool. Clearly, I needed to update and revise my expectations, so I pushed my projected completion date back to November 30th of this year.
Originally I had planned an 80,000 word novel, but recent experience in editing has really made obvious to me how many words get cut during that process – so I changed my word count goal to 100,000. That gives me a realistic amount for the first edit, with room to cut and revise down without cutting it too short.
Scrivener shows a daily word goal based on your total word count and days remaining to your goal, and in order to get my goals in the bag, it shows I’ll need to write 284 words per day. That’s not too bad, considering some people I know are cranking out several thousand per day on their books!
Today I wrote 506 words, which means my daily requirement will adjust down slightly for tomorrow. Every day I write beyond the daily goal is less time left until I finish my book – so this is a great goal.
Updates to come…
P.S. I’m also adding another page to the navigation bar today. “Excerpts” will highlight occasional passages of my writing to give you an idea of what I’m working on behind the scenes. Take a look at the first sample!
