…And I’m back

After my last update, I turned around and (thanks to the office needing me “on call”) had the time to crank out those missing 700 words, so in truth I did make my goal this weekend. It hurt in ways my brain wasn’t ready for, mostly the next morning when I tried to function on less than 5 hours of sleep, but that was more work’s fault than my writing goal driving me to work.

Its funny how seeing your progress as you type can drive you a little bit harder. In my constant love/hate relationship with various editors, I decided to switch back to using yEdit2 for a little while, namely because I wanted to cut back on some bloat while typing (I think my mp3 player is taking up enough memory for the both of us frankly). Being able to set a word count goal and see that number change in near real time (every 30 seconds is close enough to real time) appears to be really motivating – either that, or I’ve suddenly hit a stride. I started recording my words written for each “session,” and during my commute this week I am averaging a 1000 words for each leg of the trip. Not too bad, especially if I can keep this speed going. Even if I only wrote on weekdays, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility (especially with Mother’s Day and other errands this weekend), that’s roughly 10,000 words a week, or only a few months until the rough outline (don’t want to call it a draft yet – still too nubile to let loose on a reader without a serious rewrite/edit session) is done. I’m targeting 80k for now, just to have a goal, although at the current pace and verbosity of the scenes, I could see going past that in the first round. I might even be able to make the magical 100k, which would be pretty cool.

And now its back to my normal Tuesday routine. yay work!