I had a fortnight where various things happened – some good and some bad – but my focus was lost and I haven’t made the “morning thousand words” into enough of a habit to drive through some distractions as yet.  That’s my ultimate aim.  However, one of the things I have learned over the years is not to go back and say “oh no, I’m [X number] of words behind, I’ll never catch up!” because then you just never go back to it.  You just say “today I’ll write another thousand words” and, eventually, you’ll have a hundred thousand.

So I followed my own advice and, here I am.

Today’s words:       1024

Total words:         17,737

at least of this little run.  Off for an early meeting at the university, but managed to get my words in first.

• Today’s words           1,140
• Total words              16,744

First working day of the week and I’m back into the old routine.

• Words today         1,037
• Total words        15,604

The manuscript is getting a bit baggy now and at some point I’m going to have to sit down and move it all into scrivener and chunk it up into scenes.  And then I can put the scenes into the right order!  But that’s a separate process, something I’ll do when I’ve got some time.  But the main task at present is simply to get some words down – sorting and editing, not to mention rewriting, I can do later.  For now: “Write more, write faster!”

Back to work today, so back to the thousand words a day routine.

Except that, well, I completely forgot, and so I actually started writing at just after midnight and here I am at one in the morning.  But I haven’t been to bed yet, so it still counts as Monday.

Yes it does.

Yes it does.

Oh, suit yourself.

• Words today          686
• Total words       14567

Last Sunday I didn’t feel well.  I thought it might be food poisoning or an allergy, but after a Certain Unpleasantness had ceased, the debilitating tiredness and muscular aches and pains lasted most of the week, so I’m calling it a virus.  I missed a meeting with my supervisors, and only just managed to get to a couple of meetings that were even more unmissable than that.

In short, there were no words.

I hereby declare last week null and void.  It never happened.  I will reset the clock and start again with my thousand words a day tomorrow.

I missed my word count on Thursday and Friday this week, because I had other stuff going on (a university deadline, basically, ate my concentration) but I decided to go easy on myself – my overall target has weekends off built into it, after all.  So this morning I had another go, and here we are with another thousand words added.  I also took the opportunity to read through what I’ve written so far and, yes, it’s a bad draft, with random bits in the wrong place.  But there are some good words in there.  The second draft will be OK.

Today’s scores:

•  Words today           1,063
• Total words             13,880

Really not happy with today’s words at all.  The scene is unwieldy and out of control, and the progression of events isn’t working.  However I am following my own advice and ignoring all the things that need to be fixed in favour of ploughing on and getting words on paper.  It’s a Bad Draft – I’ll fix the things that need to be fixed when I make it into a Reasonable Draft, later.

Today’s results:

• words today         1,056
• total words         12,817

11761 is the overall total now: 1027 new words today.  One of the incidents I wrote last week occurs too early in the story, so I’ve gone back a bit and I’m now filling in the intervening incidents.  But I’m still using the technique of a fresh Write or Die document to do the words, pasting them into the end of a master Word file, and then at some point I’ll copy it all to Scrivener, play around with the scene divisions, and get the scenes into the right order.

But that comes later.  FIRST, I want to lay down a serious number of words.  It’s a new technique for me, but so far it seems to be bearing fruit.  We’ll see what a hundred thousand words of Bad Draft looks like at the end of the day!

… and I crossed the 10,000 word barrier!  Yay me!

Today’s numbers:

• This morning’s words:    1,162
• Total words to date:      10,734

I am really pleased with how it’s going.  (But not pleased enough to start publicising this blog just yet!)

This morning was a slow start: I’m still sitting at the breakfast table at 10.31 in the morning!  However, I did it – I found that using “write or die” rather than simply opening a new word document as I have done the last couple of days helped a lot.  I also started off by reading through the words I’d written so far and reassuring myself that, even though there is repetition and filler and some material that needs to go elsewhere in the next draft, nevertheless this IS a first draft, growing at a remarkable rate!

• Today’s words:       1078
• Total words:             8060