I tried my best to stick to one writing project for nearly three weeks now and I have learned that the concept of “The One Thing” cannot be applied to my life as a writer; I tried to focus myself on just the one project – the Anthropomorphic Dystopian project, but I can’t just focus on one thing at a time.
The aim of forcing me to do one thing at a time was to make me more productive, but for my brain, my ADD brain, it made it less productive. I was writing overall three thousand words a day less than usual just to stick true to the “one” project.
As soon as I decided to give up the “one thing” concept I decided to start immediately and by the end of the day my words had increased by three thousand again.
Five hundred words to the current project and a further 2800 or so words towards a vampire project; this was not including words I wrote in journals, handwritten, poetic form or blog posts – just words towards novels or stories.
Because I have had some DMs suggesting I am a liar about my word count, particularly as I have nothing published yet, I am going back to what I used to do – that is sharing my daily word counts. I am going to do this primarily on twitter @CreativeTardy and the words are going to be code worded to whatever project I wrote towards that day!
Here are the meanings behind my code words for twitter.
AD – my anthropomorphic dystopian project (the one I want to send out in October)
B1 – blog posts scheduled
CS – my Christmas special novel
D1 – my number 1 dragon novel
DW – Dystopian warrior story
FN – my number 1 fantasy novel
Ho – my number 1 horror project
J – Journal entries and non-fiction work
MP – morning pages (rarely done these days though)
P1 – The play I am writing
P2 – plans and notes towards new work
PS – Poems and songs written
SP – my number 1 steam punk novel
V1 – my number 1 vampire novel
V2 – my number 2 vampire novel
So, I am doing this to show how much I do actually write as a hobbyist – the word count will improve in September because I consider myself taking this on as an actual job by then; so instead of working whenever I feel like it, I will be writing seriously every day an absolute minimum word count. Because I am deadly serious that my life is going to begin at forty!
If there is one thing that people who know me personally can say about me is that I am stubborn when I have something in mind.
I work better and more frequently when there are a handful of projects on the go at once; I am a rigorous planner and I have been mulling over these ideas for years now, which means that in my mind, they really are ready for release into the wild, as it were.
From September the 1st 2022, I will be making sure I write a minimum of 3k words a day towards any currently writing novel but I will work for around four hours a day so it could be a higher word count upon reflection, as well as the other stuff on top. For me, that’s an easy goal, because I do write anywhere between 500 and 3500 on writing days as a hobbyist and I never write for more than two hours in a day. But in September I won’t be a hobbyist anymore!
I am dedicating 3k to a day, so that I know when I am having a tough day (medically speaking) I can stop and take a breather, but I would have the intention on good days to work for the full four hours, which in my experience, could total up to around 7k!
I’ve worked out the best time for me to write based on school holidays and when Henry has sick days off from school – for me, I will write two hours twice a day. My best times to write where I am less likely to be disturbed when Henry is home are 1pm to 3pm and 1am to 3am every day. That’s doable for me because most days I don’t sleep until 4am anyway!
This will mean that from September my social media presence will probably start around 3:30pm GMT till maybe 5pm depends on life circumstances and I may also go on half an hour after I write in early hours too.
Just a heads up that I am about to do some serious writing!
Thanks for reading!
tardycreative.com 