Weekly updates of my word count were part of my original New Year’s Resolution plans, and I was quite pleased when that all had to go out of the window. One of my big concerns was that each week I’d be forced to check-in and reveal that I had in fact written nothing that week. This is how bad things had got before Christmas. I’d written myself into a bit of a corner and wasn’t sure how to get out of it. (In the end, I typed the words ‘And then the phone rang’ at the awkward point I was struggling to write. It doesn’t seem to jar in the flow of the scene but took it off in a completely different direction, really opening up the plot.) Now I’ve gone off on this new tangent, the story is flowing much better. My main character appears to have forgotten the problem he was trying to solve, but I’m sure we’ll get back to it at some point.
So, if I shelved the plan for weekly updates, why am I writing this? The reason is I’m so proud of this week’s output that I had to shout about it. Since last Saturday (January 8th) I’ve written about 4,000 words! This is unbelievable and almost unprecedented for me. I should add that there has been nothing special about this week, no days off work to use as writing sessions. Instead I’ve motivated myself to write three morning sessions of about an hour fitted into my morning commute. No getting up earlier (sorry, but I’m not getting up any earlier than my usual 6am!), no taking time off. Despite having probably the busiest week at work so far, I’ve still managed a really good output. It may all be rubbish, it may need a lot of editing (it will!) but that does not matter. All that matters is that it’s on the page and that Book Two is now over the 60,000-word point. This is amazing and it’s left me really inspired.
Let’s see how much I can do this week!