Tag: Goals and Plans

Managing time and mental space in a foreign country

Some of you asked for a writing update, so I figure I might as well do a quick post on my current projects and where they are.  I’ve also been experimenting with my daily schedule a bit, so it would probably be good to blog about that as well.

Right now, the main project taking up all of my attention is the 3.0 draft of Heart of the Nebula.  It’s a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and continues the story from James McCoy’s point of view, five years later.  I’m making a lot of changes, toning down the romantic subplot and emphasizing the more interesting social and ethical issues.  When I’m through, I think it will be completely different from the first couple of drafts, but in a way that’s truer to the spirit of the first book.

I’ve only been managing about 500 to 1,500 words per day, though, which is abysmally low compared to my usual word count.  Part of that is because I’m throwing out entire sections and drafting new ones from scratch, but the more significant part is that I don’t have as much mental space for writing as I did back in the States.

Basically, moving to a foreign country and starting a new career has taken a lot more out of me than I thought it would.  I teach 18 lessons per week, some with as many as 30 or 35 kids, across grades 1 through 12.  Culturally, everything is completely different too.  So far, the shock hasn’t been too bad–I really love it out here in Georgia–but it’s made the writing a little bit more difficult than I’d expected.

I have a lot of free time, though, so that’s not a problem: the problem is clearing my mind and keeping the creative juices fresh.  Here’s how I’m going to do it:

  1. Limit internet time.  As tempting as it is to turn to the familiarity of the internet, it’s a huge time-suck and doesn’t really do anything for the culture shock.  A much better thing for that would be to spend more time reading.  From now on, I’m going to limit myself to one internet session per day, no longer than 2 hours (more if there’s something I actually need to do).
  2. Get out more.  I get cabin fever very easily, and it’s only gotten worse now that I’m in a foreign culture.  Fortunately, there are tons of places to explore, and in my local neighborhood I’m kind of a celebrity (hey look, it’s the American!  Let’s chase him and shout ‘hello’!).  The prime time for this is the late afternoon, when everyone’s out and things are still open.  If I check the internet right after school and get out immediately after, I think that will help me better to focus.
  3. Get up early to write in the morning.  I tried this last week, and it was a great way to get focused and build more momentum.  Even if I only manage a couple hundred word, it gets me thinking about the story for the rest of the day, which makes it easier to pick up in the afternoon and evening.

So that’s the plan for now.  My goal is to finish Heart of the Nebula before the end of May, which is going to require a significant change of pace.  It should be pretty straightforward, though, and after this draft it shouldn’t need too many more revisions before it’s ready to publish.  If all goes well, I foresee a publishing date sometime in the fall or winter.

Do you have any other ideas for ways to manage creativity in a totally foreign culture?  If so, I’d love to hear it–that’s my biggest struggle right now.

“On hold” with WOTF

I have some interesting news.  My first quarter submission to the Writers of the Future contest has been put “on hold,” following the untimely passing of the contest’s coordinating judge, K.D. Wentworth.  Here’s the email I received this morning:

Dear Entrant,

I wanted to let you know that we have a delay in the handling of the 1st quarter due to the loss of our coordinating judge, K.D. Wentworth to cancer last week. Please bare with us while we get over this difficult time and organize the continuance of the contest. We do have another judge that is taking over and will make that annoucement soon.

Your story was placed in the hold category while K.D. was reading the hard copy submissions. You will be notified in the next month where you stand.

I’m sure you can understand the delay and thank you for being patient.

Best,

Joni Labaqui- Contest Director

From what I understand, this means that K.D. read my story and didn’t assign it a rejection or honorable mention, but put it in a pile of stories to read leader.  It’s possible, of course, that the story could still receive a flat rejection, but it appears that most of the rejections have already gone out, so that’s probably unlikely.

The story I submitted is the first part of a novel which I hope to publish as soon as I hear back from the contest.  If it wins or makes published finalist, however, those plans might be put on hold.  I’ll let you know more as it happens.

If I do win, I’ll probably end up spending all the prize money just to come back to the States to accept the award.  My Georgian co-teachers think that’s hilarious.

Still here

Sorry about missing the Trope Tuesday post yesterday.  My internet was sporadic, and I didn’t think it was worth it to keep refreshing every time I wanted to access tvtropes.  I’ll make it up next week with a good one.

The rest of the week is going to be pretty busy.  We have a make-up class on Saturday and I’m going to Tbilisi on Sunday for church, so things might be a little sporadic on this blog.  However, I’m making good progress on Star Wanderers, even if it is a bit slower than I would like.  I should finish up Part III this week and Part IV sometime in early May.

I haven’t heard anything from Writers of the Future yet, but judging from the forums, neither have most of the others who submitted this quarter.  The official results should come out in May, though, and as soon as they do, I’ll publish the first part of Star Wanderers (provided it doesn’t win).

I’m really excited about this one; it’s one of those stories that came when I least expected it, and practically wrote itself.  The first part, which stands completely on its own, is about 17k words, or 60 print pages–basically, a very short novella.  It’s a science fiction romance set within the same universe as my other Gaia Nova novels; in the next few days, I’ll post a blurb and the first couple chapters for you guys to check out.

So that’s what’s going on out here.  In other news, my Georgian host family just got a washing machine, and the excitement it generated reminded me of that scene in Fiddler on the Roof when the village gets its first sewing machine.  Here’s the youngest son watching it go round and round:

Between this, internet TV, and the hot water heater they installed a few months ago, they seem to be moving steadily up in the world.  Hopefully I’m not putting too much of a burden on them.  I buy fruit from time to time and got the host mom a piece of silverware from Turkey.  From what I could tell, she was really happy with it.

Anyhow, it’s getting late and I’d better go.  ღამე მშვიდობის!

What’s your backup?

...have you?

So I just got back from Easter vacation in Turkey, at Trabzon and Lake Uzungöl.  It was pretty awesome–I’ll definitely be blogging about it in the next couple of days!  First, though, I wanted to share something interesting that happened on the way back.

While I was hanging out in Batumi with some other TLG volunteers eating Adjarian khatchapuri (an experience in itself), we got to talking about what we’re going to do with our lives after we get back to the States.  Most of them didn’t really want to think about it, which surprised me, so I asked why.

They told me they didn’t want to have to figure out the rest of their lives–that coming out to Georgia to teach English was a way of putting off those major life decisions.  Fair enough.  They then asked me if I’ve figured it out.   I said yes: that I want to be a full-time writer, and that I’m out here to see the world and get some cultural experience as I try to make that dream a reality.

One of the girls then asked what my backup was if that didn’t work out.  To be honest, I had no idea what to say.  My plan at this point is to just keep teaching and traveling until the dream becomes a reality.  Am I confident that it will?  Eventually, yeah–as long as I keep writing, which I certainly will.

I thought about it a bit on the way back, and realized that my mindset has shifted tremendously in the past few years.  When I was back in college, and to some extent for the first year after I graduated, I used to worry a lot about my “backup plan.” It was a way of addressing the fear of failure, of creating an illusion of safety by having a “fallback.”

I’m sure there are careers where that’s a good idea.  Generally, those are careers with definite paths, where if you don’t pass a certain number of checkpoints, you’re basically screwed.  With writing, though, there is no set path that everybody follows–especially now with ebooks and epublishing.  Because of this, it’s impossible to really fail–either you keep on trying until you make it, or for one reason or another you give up.

Ever since I graduated in 2010, I’ve been structuring my life in such a way that I can continue to pursue my writing.  Every job I’ve taken has just been a stepping stone, a bridge to allow me to keep pursuing this dream.  Have I made it yet?  No, but I haven’t given up yet either, so I haven’t had to fall back on my backup–whatever that would mean at this point.

From the outside, it probably looks like I’m being hopelessly responsible–that, or willfully oblivious to a hundred things I should be worried sick about.  However, I’m actually quite confident that I’m on the right path and things will work out–and that surprises me.  It’s like that moment when you realize you’re actually swimming, not just kicking and thrashing about the pool.

Worst case scenario, I fall head over heels in love with an awesome, wonderful girl, and after a few heady months filled with blissful romance, I wake up one morning and realize that I’m married.  If that happens, I might have to put my writing on hold for a while until I get things sorted out so that I can support both myself and my wife–but then again, with her help, I might be able to do twice as much, or even more.  Perhaps that will help my writing career even more than trying to go it alone.

So really, there is no back up plan or worst case scenario–just the future.  And as Georgians are so fond of saying, “no one can know what will happen in future.”

What a relief.

Staying in Georgia

So I’ve decided to stay here in Georgia for another semester.  Things are working out really well, I enjoy teaching English, and for the full experience I think it will be better to stay for a full year.

I’m not sure if I’ll stay in Kutaisi yet, though.  It’s a convenient place to live, but I have upwards of 30 kids in my classes, which can be a real challenge.  I’d kind of like to spend the next semester in a village or small town, where I can know all the kids by name.  Then again, I really like it here in Kutaisi, and I’m doing so much where I am that I’d kind of like to stay, just to see how things turn out.

Currently, I’m teaching grades 1-6, 9-10, and 12.  It sounds like a lot, but I’ve got great co-teachers who help out a ton.  I teach 18 class periods per week, which is enough to keep me busy but not so much that I feel overwhelmed.  My favorite grade to teach is probably 4th or 5th, where the kids know enough to surprise you but don’t have all the issues that come with teenagers.  There are different things I enjoy about each grade, though, so it’s good to have a mix.

The second semester doesn’t start until September, so that’ll give me a few months off to do whatever I like.  My current plan is to come home and work on getting print editions of my books out.  TLG will pay for my flight out and back, and my parents will let me stay at their place over the summer, so I think things will work out quite well.

As for what to do in December once this tour is finished–that’s an entirely different question.  I could probably leverage my experience here in Georgia to get a much higher paying job in Asia or the Persian Gulf, but all I’m really looking for is a job situation to tide me over until my writing career takes off.  That, and an awesome cultural experience.

What I’d REALLY like to do is find some remote desert village in the Middle East, where the locals will pay for room and board, my book royalties will pay the rest, the cultural experience will give me a chance to practice my Arabic, and my teaching skills will make a real difference in the local community.

Towards that end, I found this site called Workaway.  A friend of mine used it to get a short-term job in a Bedouin camp in Wadi Rum, and there are TONS of other opportunities listed just like it.  I freaked out a little when I saw it, because it looks AWESOME.  When I was in Jordan, I used to fantasize about spending some time in the desert with the Bedouin, so getting the chance to actually do that would be amazing!

TLG will pay for my flight home at the end of the second semester, but I can opt to go anywhere else, so long as the ticket price isn’t any more than Tbilisi to JFK.  Since this is the year my sister’s get together with their in-laws for Christmas, it might be better to go straight from Georgia to my next job at the end of December.

I was thinking about it as I walked around my neighborhood earlier today, and it made me wonder: why did I wait so long?  There are so many awesome opportunities overseas–if you don’t have any debt or anyone you need to support, you could spend years hopping from one random adventure to the next.  I could spend years doing that.  And with epublishing, all I really need is my netbook and periodic internet access to put up new books as I write them–everything else more or less takes care of itself.  It’s fantastic.

In any case, that’s the plan for now.  I’m taking the night train to Tbilisi tonight, so I’d better go get ready for that.  See you around!

Back to writing (and publishing)

I was snowed in again this weekend, so I took advantage of the time to work on my writing–specifically, to figure out what to work on next.  Things have been kind of crazy these past few weeks, so I haven’t written very much, but now that I’ve settled into a new routine, it should be much easier to get back to writing again.

The plan is to finish Star Wanderers first, before April.  After taking a couple weeks off, I think I’m ready to get back into that project and write through the wall that I’d run up against earlier.  Besides, Stars of Blood and Glory needs more time; it’s only been about a month since I finished the last draft, and that’s not long enough to get a fresh perspective.

I’m a little past the midway point on Star Wanderers–around the middle of part III–so it should be about 20k to 25k before the whole novel is finished.  I wrote the first part in a little less than two weeks, so three weeks should be enough to finish at least the rough draft.  The main thing is to write every day and get some momentum going, which shouldn’t be too hard–I’m still really excited about this project.

As you may recall, I submitted Part I to Writers of the Future.  From lurking on the forums, it appears that the first round of rejections and honorable mentions are starting to come out.  I haven’t heard anything yet, so I’m still in the running.  Since no news is good news at this point, part of me hopes that I don’t hear back for a while–but the other part wants to hear back soon, so I can go ahead and publish it!

Here’s the current plan:

  1. Finish the rough draft of the complete novel.
  2. Publish Part I at $1.50 (free to newsletter subscribers).
  3. Get feedback for part II, revise and publish.
  4. Repeat for Parts III and IV, with one or two months between each release.

As a teaser, here’s the cover that I made when I was back in Massachusetts.  I decided to go with some NASA / Hubble images, at least for the first release.  Here it is:

Everything is ready to go; I just need to hear back from Writers of the Future before I can publish it.  I’m going to wait until the rest of the novel is finished, though, just to be safe.  Expect to see it sometime in April (unless it’s a finalist for WOTF–hey, you never know).

Enough for now; I’d better get back to writing.  See you around!

Teaching English and other future plans

I got my flight plans today from the TLG people in Georgia!  I’ll be flying out next week from JFK, connecting in Kiev and arriving at Tbilisi Wednesday afternoon.  On Monday, I’ll take the train down to my aunt and uncle’s place in New York city and spend a couple of days with them before flying out.

As you can imagine, I’m really excited about all of this!  It’s an adventure, a chance to experience a new culture, and an opportunity to start a new career and get some good experience, both for my resume and for my writing.  Since this is such a huge change in direction, I want to do some thinking aloud about where I see myself going in the next couple of years.  If you have any ideas or suggestions, please chime in!

Stay in Georgia for 2+ years: Right now, this honestly doesn’t seem too likely, but I’m not ruling it out.  After getting some English teaching experience, I’ll probably want to take a higher paying job somewhere else.  The biggest reason to stay would be if I find a local girl I’m interested in pursuing, but that’s not why I’m going out there so I’m not planning on it.  But then again, you never know.

Spend 1+ year(s) in Georgia and take a job in the Persian Gulf region: This is probably the most likely scenario. After teaching in Georgia, I’ll hopefully be in a good position to apply for for more lucrative jobs in Saudi Arabia or the other Gulf states.  I also really want to go down there because of the chance it would give me to work on my Arabic.  From what I’ve heard, there’s not a whole lot of interaction with the local culture, but I’m sure there’s plenty to see and do–and if there isn’t, then all the more time to spend writing.

After a couple of years in the Gulf, I’ll probably have enough money saved up to come back to the US and focus for a while on my writing career. That would be pretty awesome.  Or maybe I’ll decide to take that money and travel for a bit.  The potential downside, though, is that it’ll probably be harder to find a girl in Saudi Arabia–but then again, you never know.

Spend 1+ year(s) in Georgia and take a job elsewhere in the Middle East: Not as lucrative as the gulf, but the cultural experience might be more fulfilling.  I’ve already been to Jordan once, but only long enough to barely whet my appetite. 🙂 I’ve got friends there, too, which is also huge.  And even if I go somewhere besides Jordan, it will give me a great chance to work on my Arabic, maybe even more so than the Gulf.

The biggest downside, of course, is the security situation.  With the revolution in Syria quickly turning to a bloody civil war, and the brinksmanship between Israel and Iran getting worse by the day, it doesn’t look like things are going to be any better a year from now.  I’ll have to keep an eye on developments as they happen, and stay away from the region if thing heat up too significantly.

Spend 1+ year(s) in Georgia and take a job in Eastern Europe: This would be my second preference, after taking a job in the Middle East.  I’ve got a friend in the Ukraine who says it’s really good there, and I’ve got a lot of Czech heritage so it might be good to shoot for a job in the Czech Republic as well.  I won’t be able to work my Arabic as much, but my sister is making a lot of family history breakthroughs so it would be kind of cool to get in touch with those people.  Also, the security situation is considerably less volatile.  Not sure about pay, but I’m sure it will be enough to get by.

Spend 1+ year(s) in Georgia and take a job in East Asia: I don’t have a whole lot of interest in East Asia right now, but I hear there are some fairly lucrative teaching jobs out there, and I have a lot of friends with connections to Japan and China.  It would definitely be another adventure, that’s for sure.

Spend 1+ year(s) in Georgia and come back to the United States: This is probably the least likely scenario.  My main goal in going to Georgia is to use the experience with TLG to launch into a career teaching English as a second language.  Coming back to the states after a successful run would be kind of pointless…but hey, sometimes life gets in the way, so I can’t rule it out.

Come back to the United States in June: Right now, I’m only signed up with the TLG program through June, but if I find the program agreeable I’ll probably stay on for another semester.  Probably.  It really depends, and I can’t say for sure.

If I did come back to the states after fulfilling my term, it would probably be because I change my mind about pursuing a TEFL career altogether.  The only real way I can see that happening is if teaching English seriously hinders my writing, and that seems highly unlikely (it’s only thirty hours per week, including prep time).  From everything I’ve seen, this seems like a career I’m well suited for, and one that will be much easier to balance with my writing than anything else short of working graveyard shift at a hotel.

And if, by some random fluke of luck, my books start to sell like crazy while I’m overseas, I’ll probably still pursue this career choice, at least for the next few years.  When you don’t have anything else to get you out of the house, writing can be extremely boring.  Besides, I want to have something to write about, and what better way to do that than to spend a few years living and working abroad?

So that’s what I see happening in the mid- to near-future.  I’ll definitely post regular updates on my adventures, though the main focus of this blog will still be my writing.

And as for the next week, I plan to revise through Star Wanderers: Part II before leaving, then work on the next two parts of that novel before potentially moving on to Edenfall.  Really, I have no idea what I’ll do, but before Tuesday, I want to at least get Star Wanderers: Part II ready for my first readers.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be an adventure!

Quick update and Star Wanderers cover previews

First off, I’m happy to say that Stars of Blood and Glory is coming along quite nicely.  I’m currently finishing up with the last couple of chapters, and should have the first draft done by the middle of next week.  Hopefully by then I’ll know if and when I’m starting my TEFL job overseas, but I’m sure I’ll have it finished before then.

This first draft is pretty rough, so I’m sure it’ll be a while before it’s up and ready for you to read.  For some reason, this draft is extremely short–I doubt it’ll be much longer than 80,000 words.  I don’t know if that means my writing has gotten tighter since Bringing Stella Home, or if I’ve unintentionally left too much out.  I’ll probably let it simmer for a few months, do a quick revision, and send it out to some first readers, just like I’ve done for Heart of the Nebula.

In the meantime, I’m getting really excited to pick up work again on Star Wanderers. I’ve been workshopping part II in Kindal’s writing group, just to get some reactions.  I’ll probably revise that part while I’m writing parts III and IV, getting it ready for publication after I hear back from Writers of the Future according to the serial model I outlined previously.

I’m so excited, in fact, that I went ahead and made some mock-ups for the cover art!

Pretty cool, huh?  These make me sooo happy. 🙂

I’m not quite sure if this is the right design, though.  Star Wanderers is very much a science fiction romance, and while these covers definitely scream “science fiction!” they don’t really seem to say “romance!”

My original idea was to use these as backgrounds and commission an artist to do some character portraits from the waist up, using one portrait each for the foreground.  But then again, that might make the covers a bit too complicated.  I can always redo the first one to get rid of the planet, keeping the galaxy–the other ones probably wouldn’t be so bad with a character in the middle.  But then again…

I don’t know.  What do you guys think?  If you saw one of these covers while browsing for ebooks, what kind of impression would it give you, and would you be interested in checking it out?

(By the way, I made the covers with Celestia.  Coolest.  Space simulation.  Ever.)

EDIT: I decided to redo the first cover; the planet wasn’t quite doing it for me.  I’m not sure if that means I should redo the cover for the third part, since that one is a heck of a lot more colorful than the others…hmm.  We’ll have to see.

What I’ve been up to recently

I thought it would be a good idea to do a quick post explaining what I’ve been up to the past month or so, since a lot of things have changed and I’m sure they will be changing a lot more in the future.  So, here’s what’s up:

As you may or may not know, I decided about four or five months ago to leave the USA to teach English abroad.  For the past few little while, I’ve been applying for a program to teach English to elementary school kids in Georgia.  I had the interview over Skype just yesterday, and I think it went pretty well!  I should hear back in the next couple of days, so fingers crossed on that.

If they decide to hire me, I’ll leave in three weeks and stay until at least mid-June.  At that point, I’ll either sign up for another semester or go somewhere else, either the Middle East or Eastern Europe. The pay isn’t great, but it seems like a good cultural experience, and I’m a lot more interested in the Caucasus than I am in East Asia (no offense to Asians).

Ever since I graduated in 2010, I’ve been looking for a fulfilling career that I can balance with my writing aspirations.  I learned pretty quick that that simply doesn’t exist in Washington DC; either you sacrifice everything for your career, including your family, or you end up trapped in an office pushing papers all day.  In Utah, I bounced around a lot of temporary jobs while struggling to make ends meet, but I never found anything more permanent that seemed to strike a balance.

I hope that teaching English will help me to find that balance, and from what I’ve heard from some of my former expat friends, I’m optimistic that it will.  Perhaps more importantly, it will probably enrich my writing by exposing me to new peoples and cultures.  Desert Stars was certainly enriched by the time I spent in Jordan; without having lived in that culture, I don’t think I would have been able to write it.  Besides, English is something I’m good at, and so is teaching–so why not capitalize on the skills I already have?  It certainly sounds better than wasting my 20s in a warehouse.

So that’s the plan: launch a TEFL career and spend at least the next three to five years abroad.  At least.  I might not get married until my 30s–or who knows, I might find someone out there and go native–but this is something I want to do as a career, not just as temporary filler before I figure out what I want to do with my life.  I’m through with filler.  Whether it takes one year or ten for my writing career to take off, I’m going to get out and do something useful and worthwhile.

That’s the plan, anyway.  And of course, I’ll always keep writing.

Right now, I’m finishing up Stars of Blood and Glory; I’m on chapter 15, with only three more and an epilogue after that, so I should finish that well before I leave.  After that, the next big project is Star Wanderers, which is already about halfway finished.  I’ll probably take some time off and work on polishing part II, then release parts I and II sometime in the spring–unless by some weird fluke it wins Writers of the Future.  I’ll know in February.

And after that?  Well, I’m thinking it’s almost time to pick up Edenfall again, but I can’t say for sure. Probably, though–I definitely want to finish that one before the end of the year, and preferably get it published.  After Stars of Blood and Glory, I’ll probably take a break from the McCoy continuity in the Gaia Nova universe, though I may pick up something from Jeremiah’s timeline in Star Wanderers.  I really want to do a parallel novel from Noemi’s point of view–maybe that’s the one I’ll do in seven days, just to hit that resolution.  Everything has to be ready fist, though, and right now it isn’t.

So much is changing–I have no idea where I’ll be in the next six months, creatively or physically. But right now, I’m just enjoying a relaxing time with my parents and getting ready for the next big transition.  Life is good.

Writing log results

For the last month or so, I’ve been keeping track of my daily writing habits to look for patterns that might give me some insight on how to improve my creative process.  I’ve amassed somewhere around 65 data points, and I think the results are clear enough to notice some trends.

Just some preliminary background information: for most of this time, I’ve either been on vacation or at my parents’ house, waiting to start an English teaching job in another country.  I haven’t had school or a full-time job, so my schedule has been pretty open and flexible.  Also, the numbers track progress on the first drafts for Star Wanderers and Stars of Blood and Glory, and do not count revisions of any kind.

Here are the results:

The first graph plots word count by duration spent writing.  As you can see, there’s a definite trend: the longer I write, the more I tend to write.  No surprises there.  Most writing sessions are somewhere between 45 and 90 minutes, or 500 and 1,500 words.

The second graph plots the average writing rate (in words per hour) per session by hours spent writing, and it’s a little bit murkier.  In writing sessions of less than 45 minutes, I tend to average a little over 1000 words/hour, but things get murkier between 45 and 90 minutes, and after 90 minutes, I tend to be around 600 and 800 words/hour.

The overall trend appears to be down–that is, the longer I write, the slower I tend to write–but there appears to be a counter-trend, too, where if I start off slow I can increase the pace by writing for a longer amount of time.  Is that true, or is that simply a sharper downward trend line?

I think it’s a genuine counter-trend, and here’s why:

This graph shows writing rate plotted against word count, and it pretty clearly shows two trend lines: one starting at 1,000 to 1,200 words/hour and going slightly down, the other starting at 400 to 600 words and going up.  At about 1,500 total words, they converge at around 800 words/hour and appear to remain flat, though there isn’t really enough data to be able to say.

What I think this shows is that I have two different writing styles.  The first is to start off slow and gradually write my way into the story, picking up the pace but never really going over 800 words/hour.  The other is to start off at a sprint of 1,200 words/hour or so, but to slowly drop off to 800 words/hour at around 90 minutes or 1,500 words.

The next graph plots the total word count of each writing session by the time of day in which I started the session.  Interestingly, there is no trend; the points are all over the map.  This tells me that there is no “best time” for me to write.  Other time-related factors might influence how much I can write, but time of day itself does not.

A quick glance at the next graph confirms this.  It plots writing rate by time of day, and the results are much the same as the graph for word count.  I tend to write at a more consistent pace in the afternoon–around 1,000 words/hour–but really, there is no consistent trend.

This tells me that my first session of the day tends to be slow and gradual, but that once I’ve written myself into the story, the writing comes a lot faster.  In other words, if I wake up early and hit the ground running, I tend to write more and write faster throughout the day.  If I get lazy and sleep in, the whole day tends to be shot.

The last two graphs plot word count and writing rate by date.  Before January 3rd or so, I was either spending time with family or on the road / traveling cross-country by train.  Even so, there wasn’t a whole lot of variation, though my writing rate converged around 800-1,000 words/hour for a while before fluctuating again.

What this tells me is that stability and momentum tend to lead to more consistency in my writing habits.  If I’m constantly on the road, it becomes more challenging to keep up the pace.  Even so, as long as I can find make at least 45 to 90 minutes to write, I can pound out about the same number of words per session.

So in conclusion, it seems that the best way to improve my writing habits and streamline my creative process would be to:

  1. Get up early and start the day writing.
  2. Write in short, condensed sessions of 45 to 90 minutes each, with periodic breaks in between.
  3. Don’t worry about time of day when planning time to write; just do it whenever time can be made available.

However, unless I can get to the point where I’m regularly averaging +1,000 words after two hours, it’s going to be really hard to put in 10k words or more per day.  At 800 words/hour, it takes 12.5 hours to hit 10k, and after about four or five sessions at 1,000 words/hour, the well starts to dry up.

A much more practical goal, for now at least, would be to shoot for a consistent 5k words per day.  The week before last, I hit about 5.5k on Monday, a little less than 4k on Tuesday and Wednesday, and back around 2.5k for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  My running 7-day total for the entire week was above 20k, which is pretty good, but if I could get to stay between 25k and 30k for some time, that would be an accomplishment.

I haven’t totally given up on hitting a 10k/day average, but at this point, it seems that I need to set some stepping stones first.  5k/day seems like a much better goal for now–especially since I don’t know how things are going to change once I’m traveling again.  But at least I have a better idea of how my own process works.  I expect I’ll be writing a lot more in the weeks and months to come!