People have asked me to share what my hardest working day in writing looks like generally; basically from what my friends have experienced when staying with me, it contains too much stimulus during my work that they get terrible headaches within the hour of just watching me, let alone having it as part of their own writing regime!
But I will give you the general gist of what my serious writing days look like!
I wake up and it can take around ninety minutes for me to clear my chest before I can even get out of bed!
My instant reaction is to drink a small glass of water and then find some caffeine, either Pepsi original or a black sweet coffee and a salty snack or apple.
I open my computer, wait for fifteen minutes for it to load up and update stuff. My instant reaction is to update goodreads, if I have been reading the night before.
I put on my choice of music to get me into the mood for writing a specific scene I left off from last time.
To warm my brain up I write a blog post, some poems or research the latest in fantasy, horror and sci-fi entertainment or I look at my aspiration quotes in my positivity diary, depends on my mood when I woke up.
This can be a further ninety minutes before actually writing towards a novel.
I tend to avoid emails until after writing, because a bad email can completely throw my day!
Whilst writing, depends on the scene and my mood, I may switch the music to some TV or YouTube background stimulus, of scenes and subjects I am working on, it’s my attempt to try and move myself out of reality for a while.
When I am writing, I tend to write in fifteen minute bursts, pause, read what I have done, talk to someone who is around for a few minutes, watch or listen to more stimulus for around fifteen minutes, before continuing on different work entirely.
If I am on a roll, I generally can keep the roll for up to three hours if I am completely undisturbed, this never happens in this house before midnight! So if I want a long roll in my writing, I have to start this after midnight generally! Depends on how busy my household is during the day – what I mentioned here, is my serious working day when Henry is at school.
But a majority of my work is done between the hours of midnight and four AM, when I used to take my writing more seriously!
Because of the kinds of stimulus I need and I am deaf, I have to rely on headphones to get the full benefit of the stimulus at those hours in the night, because how loud I need it to be to be functional is anti-social! My hearing is at just less than 1 hertz in my right ear and 6.7 hertz in my left!
So generally I work in fifteen minute bursts, rest for fifteen minutes and whilst resting from novel writing, I am actually preparing blog posts, writing poetry or increasing the stimulus to prepare me to write more. Reading books and watching appropriate similar scenes elsewhere or looking for art similar to the scene I am writing about.
So, in fifteen minutes I average at writing two hundred and fifty words! On my serious writing days, towards one novel I will sometimes get three thousand words done, my record has been twelve thousand words, but that was when I couldn’t break my roll and even went hungry for it!
My average words in a serious writing day I would say is anywhere between fifteen hundred and four thousand words, depends as I said, on my mood, stimulus and household noises.
But ultimately I write towards one of four projects day to day and only treat one as the serious project, which is likely to get the fifteen hundred to three thousand words done in the day – the others may get anywhere between two hundred and fifty to a thousand words done.
My average daily word count on a serious writing day towards all current projects could estimate anywhere between two thousand and eight thousand words!
But on my not so serious writing days, it averages around eight hundred words to three thousand towards all projects, including blog posts and poetry!
I think in the past five years, since my burn out, I have a serious writing day about once a week, when I am sick, like I was between February and May this year, I got nothing written whatsoever.
For the past three weeks I have got back into the swing of writing again as I am not as ill as I have been, still sick, but it’s not enough to completely keep me in bed! So I have been writing around two thousand five hundred words per day, usually towards practise snippets, ideas, blog posts and poetry. I have not yet started to add towards my current projects.
Though saying that, I have scheduled this post in advance, this post was written on the 24th May 2022 and I believe in the next couple of days I will be writing towards my comic project and one novel project a lot, because it’s really grinding at me in my head, it won’t let me ignore it anymore.
So I think the brain is going to win by the 26th.
The reason I haven’t written towards the novels now is because I am trying so hard to decide which way I want the character to go.
The character I am working on is a complexed character with a complexed past and a huge twist at the end of the plot, but the thing is I need to be sure how he is going to react to his daughter’s decision accurately and realistically, in order for it to feel believable to my readers.
Because what she does is a pretty big thing that will take some digesting!
The problem comes at this – Paul is the only person I can talk to about my writing and he is so neutral all the time and says that everything is good, I can’t be sure if it really is! I am too sick to go to regular writer’s group’s offline and I have been trying to decide if I should do an online group instead. But I am scared of sharing my work with strangers, because once bitten twice shy and all that!
I’ve had my work stolen by longstanding family friends before!
I don’t like being on my own regarding this, I do need a group, but a lot of my friends who write abandoned me as soon as they knew I was having a baby in 2009.
Happy reading!
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