New Schedule = New Goals, New Routine: Progress Report for August 25, 2019

I’ve written 0 words so far today (don’t worry — it’s not even 8am yet!); I’m at 98,705 total for the manuscript.

Tomorrow, my second semester of graduate school starts, and my “regular” schedule for student teaching begins. I’ll be at the high school five days per week (half days on Mondays and Thursdays), and I’ll have classes three days per week (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays). My new goal is 10,000 words per week, which, if my estimates are correct, will put me on-track to finish Soldier of Dorsa around mid-October. Add another 3-4 weeks to edit and send to beta readers, and I’m looking at a publishing date of about Thanksgiving.

A little later than my original goal of mid-June. :-/

10,000 words per week = 1,450 words per day (ish). Since I find that to be sometimes unrealistic, I’m guessing that if I can do 1,000 or 1,200 words per day M-F, plus about 2,500 words on both Saturday and Sunday, I can stay on track.

To keep myself accountable, I plan on doing a progress report post (like this one) every Sunday.

I’ve never been great at sticking to systems and schedules. But it’s not too late to change — right??

I don’t know if I suffer from laziness, a scattered brain, undiagnosed ADD, or what, but I always set up systems, schedules, and ways of organizing myself… and then stop using it a month later. I wish I could be more like my mom this way, who has more self-discipline than pretty much anyone I’ve ever met in my life. She’s so very good at adulting. By contrast, I can never seem to stick to a routine.

But here’s my current system of self-accountability:

See the green check marks? That means I wrote at least 1,000 words that day. The fact that it starts on August 16th only means that I started recording my progress then.

My old system(s)

I used to write a word count goal on my calendar each day, then color in the whole square green if I hit it, yellow if I got at least half of it, and red if I did nothing. But you know what happened? I started pushing out words just to hit the goal, regardless of whether or not they were any good. This just led to more editing later on, when I had to go back and rewrite huge chunks of texts or remove entire superfluous chapters. So I stopped tracking my words at all.

For a while I tracked time, with the goal of writing for one uninterrupted hour each day (which might be broken down into, for example, two half-hour blocks). But you know what? That created the same problem. I would just write to hit the time limit instead of focusing on creating my best work.

Yet when I stopped tracking ANYTHING — words, time, whatever — then I just didn’t write as much. And we end up with books like Soldier, that should have been done in June, now scheduled for frickin’ November.

So I’m hoping my new goals — 1,000 words per day / 10,000 words per week — doesn’t create the same problem as the other systems. I realize I need SOMETHING to keep me accountable, and I’m thinking that 1,000 words, or the equivalent of about one hour, shouldn’t be too much to ask of myself.

We will see.

Anyway, blah blah blah

Sorry, this is all probably boring to you. As I’ve said before, I’m doing these progress report blog posts mainly for myself. And perhaps those of you who also write, or who want to write, get a peek inside one person’s writing process.

I firmly believe that if you’ve ever wanted to write, then you should and you can. So if this is helpful, super. And if there’s ever anything specific you wonder about or struggle with, tell me in the comments section and I can try to address it.

Okay, I’d better get some writing done!