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To recap: Thursday night, I started writing A Thing. Over the course of between an hour and a half and two hours, I ended up hammering out over 3,000 words, which is a pretty standard pace for me when I have a clear idea in my head.
The next morning, I was fairly excited about this Thing and wished to turn it into An Actual Thing, but was leery about previous excitement over previous Things that had not panned out, so I spent some time thinking about the hows and whys.
And my conclusion was that the mistake I tend to make run something like this:
Mathematically, it adds up. If I can write 2,000 words in two hours (which is fairly conservative), then I should be able to write 1,000 words in one hour, and 500 words in half an hour. Half an hour a day five days a week adds up to 2,500 words.
But there are economies of scale when it comes to writing. There are peak efficiences with valleys on either sides of them. If I can write 2,000 words in two hours, it doesn't follow that I can write 8,000 words in eight hours (a corollary mistake I sometimes make) and it doesn't follow that I can break those hours up and end up with the same words.
So when I had the start of A Thing, I didn't do what I've so often done and decide to distribute the task of continuing it in little bite-sized chunks. Instead I spent a solid couple of hours on it yesterday while the iron was still hot, and then a solid couple of horus on it today.
The result? Almost 9,000 words that constitute an entire story arc/chapter in a blog-format story spanning almost a month and a half of time.
And that's how I plan to publish this thing: as a blog, in real time. Not like Tales of MU or my other serial experiments where I'm using a blog to publish parts of a story, but alternate reality style. The blog itself will be in character. By Monday, I'll have the URL where it will go up. By the end of the week, I'll have the introductory entries in place. Next Monday, the story will start in earnest.
Before, I would have seen how easily the first week's worth of entries (what I wrote on Thursday night) came and decided that if I could write a week's worth of stuff in a day, I could write a day's worth of stuff in a day far more easily. But that's so easy to derail, and it also doesn't leave any room for editing or improvement. Each time that I wrote another set of entries, I ended up going back and tweaking what I'd written before to strengthen it, drop in foreshadowing, et cetera. It's a lot more coherent than if I'd written it day by day.
Being presented to the world as a blog, it's not going to update on a set schedule. Some days will have multiple entries. Some days, there will be gaps. That's why I'm not going to be doing any promoting beyond my immediate circles until the first arc is concluded and can be read as it is. I'm not yet sure if the story will continue past that point or not, but I've got a month and a half to figure that out. Spending a half hour a day every day is a losing strategy, but finding a couple of days once a month when I've had time and space to think about what I want to do and then spending a couple of hours doing it? That could be a winning model.
(If you don't want to wait to read it, it's up on my Patreon feed as a sponsor-only post... and it will be included in a newsletter next week.)
The next morning, I was fairly excited about this Thing and wished to turn it into An Actual Thing, but was leery about previous excitement over previous Things that had not panned out, so I spent some time thinking about the hows and whys.
And my conclusion was that the mistake I tend to make run something like this:
- In a couple of hours one day, I wrote a few thousand words.
- So if I spend a half hour each day on it then at the end of the week I should also have a similar number of words of similar quality.
Mathematically, it adds up. If I can write 2,000 words in two hours (which is fairly conservative), then I should be able to write 1,000 words in one hour, and 500 words in half an hour. Half an hour a day five days a week adds up to 2,500 words.
But there are economies of scale when it comes to writing. There are peak efficiences with valleys on either sides of them. If I can write 2,000 words in two hours, it doesn't follow that I can write 8,000 words in eight hours (a corollary mistake I sometimes make) and it doesn't follow that I can break those hours up and end up with the same words.
So when I had the start of A Thing, I didn't do what I've so often done and decide to distribute the task of continuing it in little bite-sized chunks. Instead I spent a solid couple of hours on it yesterday while the iron was still hot, and then a solid couple of horus on it today.
The result? Almost 9,000 words that constitute an entire story arc/chapter in a blog-format story spanning almost a month and a half of time.
And that's how I plan to publish this thing: as a blog, in real time. Not like Tales of MU or my other serial experiments where I'm using a blog to publish parts of a story, but alternate reality style. The blog itself will be in character. By Monday, I'll have the URL where it will go up. By the end of the week, I'll have the introductory entries in place. Next Monday, the story will start in earnest.
Before, I would have seen how easily the first week's worth of entries (what I wrote on Thursday night) came and decided that if I could write a week's worth of stuff in a day, I could write a day's worth of stuff in a day far more easily. But that's so easy to derail, and it also doesn't leave any room for editing or improvement. Each time that I wrote another set of entries, I ended up going back and tweaking what I'd written before to strengthen it, drop in foreshadowing, et cetera. It's a lot more coherent than if I'd written it day by day.
Being presented to the world as a blog, it's not going to update on a set schedule. Some days will have multiple entries. Some days, there will be gaps. That's why I'm not going to be doing any promoting beyond my immediate circles until the first arc is concluded and can be read as it is. I'm not yet sure if the story will continue past that point or not, but I've got a month and a half to figure that out. Spending a half hour a day every day is a losing strategy, but finding a couple of days once a month when I've had time and space to think about what I want to do and then spending a couple of hours doing it? That could be a winning model.
(If you don't want to wait to read it, it's up on my Patreon feed as a sponsor-only post... and it will be included in a newsletter next week.)