Juiced On Writing

Statistics and Damned Lies

My session timing on writing today shows five hours spent. My wordcount for the day shows 5800 words, taking my total to 24,672.

That’s 50% of my target goal of 50,000 words. All in only a week. I should be jumping for joy, I should be celebrating.

Such statistics bely a couple of facts, however. The first being that today I suddenly took the management decision to produce a completely new chapter and three new scenes in the middle of it all. The story needed it. That takes me to 33 scenes, and 11 chapters – not that I’m sticking to the 3 scenes per chapter of my initial planning anyway. But from a rudimentary look into what that really means for my Pod Novel, it means that at 7 days in, and 25,000 words, I’m still only on Chapter 3, and it’s not even completed.

So I’m not, in reality, half way through the novel, I’m just scraping by at a quarter of the way – and that’s only because I put in the concentrated effort of doing double-time today.

Now, I’ve got to think about my original objectives in all of this. Is it to finish that novel in the NaNoWriMo month, or is it to simply complete those 50,000 words, and pronounce myself a ‘winner’?

Previously I’ve spent up to eight solid hours writing when writing my first Pod Novel. But this second one is a lot different in nature. It’s harder going in writing it, the words aren’t coming as easily, and there is much less joy in it.

I woke this morning with a grinding headache, which had somehow gotten worse whilst sleeping. I’d forgotten the physical toll of writing, of sitting hunched over a laptop – or worse, the neck kink that I get when using my PC in my study. I’d forgotten about the headaches, and neck aches of such a marathon effort. Those will disappear as my body adjusts itself over the second or third week, but not right now.Right now, on Day 7 of my NaNoWriMo effort, five hours is just about enough.

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