Sunday word count time! Drum roll please…
14987
This is what I have accomplished since last Sunday, getting better, much better.
Here is how it has been broken down, day by day, with excuses in tow, even though there are no excuses really for bad days!
28th July – 2437 – good
29th July – 1456 – better than bad
30th July – 3039 – writing like my old self again
31st July – 3100 – Oh yes, I am back in the flow, just like my old self again for sure
1st August – 160 – what the blazes happened here? 4 hours sleep and a migraine, darlings.
2nd August – 4329 – Making up for lost time huh? No, just an excellent day!
3rd August – 466 – what happened here? Tired and was distracted by library books!
Notes for the week –
I am writing towards three novels at once because I get twitchy if I am forced to work on the same thing over and over, variety is the spice of life right? I am going to name them for you as subject and number with main characters name because I don’t really know what the titles should be and I tend to write about the same subject a lot. So my current projects are…
Vampire story 1 – Rhea
Fantasy adventure 1 – Maud
Horror 1 – Johnny
But in February I had a dream and you know what they say about authors who dream their story plots don’t you? Well neither do I actually, but the ones who had written stories based on a dream tend to become classics – I doubt mine will, but I was surprised when the dream came to me. The dream left me until Thursday night, when it came back with more details and then again last night, it doesn’t want to leave me alone, so I have been trying to fight the urge to add a fourth book to the list of working projects, but I am fighting a losing battle, I am going to have to include a fourth book in the works.
This book will be known as werewolf story 1.
I have put a mermaid story on the back bench as I have to fall in love with it again.
I am trying so hard to stick with three ideas, but if you want me to be completely honest with you, it is so hard, because I have too many ideas and sticking to just three is literally torture, so I do sometimes sneak in titbits of other stories.
Maud and Rhea are very nearly finished actually, so around Christmas they shouldn’t be a problem anymore, well Maud should be done in the least.
Once a first draft is written I do what Stephen King suggests in his book “On Writing”, I put the story away for about three months and then come back to it with fresh eyes, it works wonders because you tend to forget what you’ve done – seriously, you do! You get to read it as a reader, not the creator and you see more mistakes and weaknesses in your story if you do this.
Maud though is not a first draft, the draft I am working on is the fourth attempt and there will be probably be a fifth as I had noticed quite recently two characters which are following the main character around are adding literally nothing to the plot, so I have to write in more interesting stuff for them or just wipe them out from existence; which would be a shame because I really want those characters to work.
I must admit, all blog posts, poetry included are first drafts, I don’t bother polishing my work here, it is not that I don’t care about my blog, it is that I care more about my novels and stuff I want to send to publishers more. If I became persnickety about my blog, the other stuff would never be done.
Further word count scores will be posted up every Sunday, I noticed it does motivate me to write as I don’t want to go the wall of shame like I should have last week – I will actually start doing that I think, if I write less than 10,000 words in a week, I will wall of shame myself.
Could I bare the humiliation of another last week?
Good luck with your own writing! But more importantly, make sure it is fun, if it is not fun for you it won’t be fun for your readers.