Final score.
Apr. 7th, 2011 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinEight hour work day.
Four-ish hours of writing.
7,000 words.
That's about 1,700 words an hour per writing-hour. Just under a thousand averaged out over work-hours. I don't have to work to convince myself that 875 words an hour is okay. I know that's good.
Adding it to the 3,000 words I wrote on Tuesday and the almost 6,000 words I wrote on Monday, that works out to about 3,000 words per day for a five day work week, which pleases me because that's what has always seemed to me to be a good average work day. I'm just discovering that it works better to do it as an average than to strive for it every day.
I have good days. I have bad days. I have average days. I think I can count on having two good days a week most weeks, especially if I'm not beating myself up over the bad days and not pushing myself too hard on the average days. I mean, this week I had a brain-fog day on Tuesday and a day when I was absolutely physically incapable of sitting at the computer and working on Wednesday and here I am on Thursday night (Thursday! I guess I got the hang of it after all?) reporting that I've got an average of 3,000 words a day.
There will be weeks when I don't get two good days, of course but if my publishing schedule means two good days gives me a buffer then those weeks will be okay. I mean, right now I've got Friday and Monday's chapters both done-ish (substantially finished, I know me and I know they'll both get some tweaks and filling out before they go up) and I have a start on Wednesday's.
I'll put Friday's chapter up just after midnight. If I end up needing sleep before then (kind of a crapshoot right now), I can still get it in queue and set up the email notification to go out auto-magically.
I'm going to do a little bit more to fill in some details on the first part later on tonight, between the time Jack leaves work and when he gets home. I'm going to restrict myself to that timeframe for work/life balance reasons. The chapter is closed until then. If I had been planning from the start to split the results up into individual chapters I would have given more attention to the opening part to begin with just to make sure it will stand okay on its own. Now that this is the gameplan I'll do that for the future.
Heh. It's funny... at one point in a previous chapter (much previous), I mentioned doing that before: splitting a chapter in half and then taking the opportunity to expand the first half. I considered that to be a good thing, in that the split allowed me to explore something (two things, in fact, because it was now two chapters) in more detail. The explanation I gave ended up being used on TVTropes as evidence of MU's "filleritis". Just goes to show how subjective these things are. Some people will always clamor for more detail about everything. Some people want things to be a little more selective.
I like TVTropes as a website and a diversion, but my feelings about it are somewhat mixed as I have a commenter right now who seems to think it's a playbook or scorecard. It's not so much that he accuses me of Doin It Rong (much, though he has)... it's more like he fails to notice that I'm not doing what his careful study of TVTropes suggests I would/should be doing and reads the story through a lens that's much heavier on things like Conservation of Detail and people learning Aesops. It's frustrating to deal with comments from someone like that. I suppose I really should learn to ignore them, but when someone addresses a question directly to me as author that's founded on completely faulty premises... well, again, I should really learn to ignore it.
But I can only do so much self-improvement at once.
You know, it's funny to me to realize that I haven't kept up the "work day" scheme I was trying since I first posted about it, basically, but somehow it unlocked the concept of thinking of things in terms of work days again in my brain. Monday, Tuesday, and today I've sat down and spent eight solid hours working. Note that some of that work was sitting here listening to music or getting up and tossing around a ball or taking a bath, but that's work. It's necessary to my writing process to pause to reflect and gather my ideas.
The point is that having eight hours allocated for work... it's working. I feel like I did when I was punching a clock, and that's not a bad thing... at my last job I was one of the most productive and happiest people on the floor. When I'm on the clock now, my mind doesn't stray much to other topics during my "down" times. My browser doesn't stray to other sites during my "up" times. And I'm getting stuff done.
Tomorrow's my tech day, belated due to injury on Wednesday. We'll see how well the concept translates. And then Monday I'll be writing for the rest of the week. Again, we'll see how well this all works after a weekend. I think I've got it, though. I'm not going to announce three updates a week unless Monday ends with me having three updates in the bag but it's in sight.
Edit-Dendum:
I just want to add about this whole work day thing... if I felt the slightest bit guilty about taking Wednesday off, the whole thing would fall apart. In the past (especially when I allowed anonymous commenting on my blog) I've had people viciously attack the idea of me having a work ethic when my schedule took a hit from sleep problems or whatever, and as I've said before, it takes a degree of brazen confidence to be a writer. You have to be fairly shameless to look at a blank page or an empty screen and say, "I can do better than that." That, and if you believe you're lazy and shiftless, it's hard to dig in and get to work.
Four-ish hours of writing.
7,000 words.
That's about 1,700 words an hour per writing-hour. Just under a thousand averaged out over work-hours. I don't have to work to convince myself that 875 words an hour is okay. I know that's good.
Adding it to the 3,000 words I wrote on Tuesday and the almost 6,000 words I wrote on Monday, that works out to about 3,000 words per day for a five day work week, which pleases me because that's what has always seemed to me to be a good average work day. I'm just discovering that it works better to do it as an average than to strive for it every day.
I have good days. I have bad days. I have average days. I think I can count on having two good days a week most weeks, especially if I'm not beating myself up over the bad days and not pushing myself too hard on the average days. I mean, this week I had a brain-fog day on Tuesday and a day when I was absolutely physically incapable of sitting at the computer and working on Wednesday and here I am on Thursday night (Thursday! I guess I got the hang of it after all?) reporting that I've got an average of 3,000 words a day.
There will be weeks when I don't get two good days, of course but if my publishing schedule means two good days gives me a buffer then those weeks will be okay. I mean, right now I've got Friday and Monday's chapters both done-ish (substantially finished, I know me and I know they'll both get some tweaks and filling out before they go up) and I have a start on Wednesday's.
I'll put Friday's chapter up just after midnight. If I end up needing sleep before then (kind of a crapshoot right now), I can still get it in queue and set up the email notification to go out auto-magically.
I'm going to do a little bit more to fill in some details on the first part later on tonight, between the time Jack leaves work and when he gets home. I'm going to restrict myself to that timeframe for work/life balance reasons. The chapter is closed until then. If I had been planning from the start to split the results up into individual chapters I would have given more attention to the opening part to begin with just to make sure it will stand okay on its own. Now that this is the gameplan I'll do that for the future.
Heh. It's funny... at one point in a previous chapter (much previous), I mentioned doing that before: splitting a chapter in half and then taking the opportunity to expand the first half. I considered that to be a good thing, in that the split allowed me to explore something (two things, in fact, because it was now two chapters) in more detail. The explanation I gave ended up being used on TVTropes as evidence of MU's "filleritis". Just goes to show how subjective these things are. Some people will always clamor for more detail about everything. Some people want things to be a little more selective.
I like TVTropes as a website and a diversion, but my feelings about it are somewhat mixed as I have a commenter right now who seems to think it's a playbook or scorecard. It's not so much that he accuses me of Doin It Rong (much, though he has)... it's more like he fails to notice that I'm not doing what his careful study of TVTropes suggests I would/should be doing and reads the story through a lens that's much heavier on things like Conservation of Detail and people learning Aesops. It's frustrating to deal with comments from someone like that. I suppose I really should learn to ignore them, but when someone addresses a question directly to me as author that's founded on completely faulty premises... well, again, I should really learn to ignore it.
But I can only do so much self-improvement at once.
You know, it's funny to me to realize that I haven't kept up the "work day" scheme I was trying since I first posted about it, basically, but somehow it unlocked the concept of thinking of things in terms of work days again in my brain. Monday, Tuesday, and today I've sat down and spent eight solid hours working. Note that some of that work was sitting here listening to music or getting up and tossing around a ball or taking a bath, but that's work. It's necessary to my writing process to pause to reflect and gather my ideas.
The point is that having eight hours allocated for work... it's working. I feel like I did when I was punching a clock, and that's not a bad thing... at my last job I was one of the most productive and happiest people on the floor. When I'm on the clock now, my mind doesn't stray much to other topics during my "down" times. My browser doesn't stray to other sites during my "up" times. And I'm getting stuff done.
Tomorrow's my tech day, belated due to injury on Wednesday. We'll see how well the concept translates. And then Monday I'll be writing for the rest of the week. Again, we'll see how well this all works after a weekend. I think I've got it, though. I'm not going to announce three updates a week unless Monday ends with me having three updates in the bag but it's in sight.
Edit-Dendum:
I just want to add about this whole work day thing... if I felt the slightest bit guilty about taking Wednesday off, the whole thing would fall apart. In the past (especially when I allowed anonymous commenting on my blog) I've had people viciously attack the idea of me having a work ethic when my schedule took a hit from sleep problems or whatever, and as I've said before, it takes a degree of brazen confidence to be a writer. You have to be fairly shameless to look at a blank page or an empty screen and say, "I can do better than that." That, and if you believe you're lazy and shiftless, it's hard to dig in and get to work.