Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Wednesday Progress Report

Not nearly as much success to report as I'd like, but I am still very happy with the work I'm doing. This book is filling out nicely. I am still trying to juggle a few too many other things, and I need to identify them and get them out of the way.

A Round Of Words In 80 Days Update:

Sunday Day 14 - 85 minutes. Still not sure I didn't have a bug of some sort. Or the super cold dry weather is doing a number on me. However, I did get "widows and orphans" and small caps done on the paper book layout (even if I still haven't done the end material.) I really need to upload that thing tomorrow.

The layout work, though, was off the clock, because it's a writing day. Though it began slowly, I did get a reasonable writing session in tonight, and I brought the old vision into focus with the new one. I believe I have set myself up for a great session tomorrow.

Monday Day 15 - 149 minutes. Some very good work done today, even though I had to stop and make chicken wings, and then eat too many of them -- and that took about three and a half hours out of my day. (I watched four episodes of Leverage, back to back, while doing this.) The story is definitely moving along at an appropriate pace for a novel, as Mick and Casey get conned into doing a whole lot of manual labor in their attempts to do a little forensic investigation.

Tuesday Day 16 - 103 minutes. The new material is going well, but I've had to tear out some threads and reweave a couple of times. I have several bits of information which I have to trickle in and I'm trying to figure out the best place. I'm not sure if I should just delay some of it. I think I need to start skipping things, and write it forward, and then drop those items in later.

In the meantime, I guess Amazon hasn't stopped doing price matching for free books after all: Waiter, There's a Clue In My Soup! is now free again at Amazon, as well as at other vendors. (They don't usually match it for other countries, unfortunately -- but you can get it free at Smashwords.) For Mick and Casey fans, there are two of their short stories in this collection.

I'll talk about that book more when I update my "high price experiment" (which isn't going well, because Sony keeps discounting Have Gun, Will Play, and so Amazon won't raise it to full price. However it does seem to be going well at Barnes & Noble.

On Friday, I'll be posting about Stuart Kaminsky and his Toby Peters books, probably my most favoritest books of all time.

See you in the funny papers.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm looking forward to "Making The Jump To Full-Time Writing, Part 2". Good job on the continued progress :)

Nicole Basaraba said...

I like how you list the time you spent writing. I think that its sometimes a better indicator than word count because there is so many more things that are involved with writing that take time. Great work

The Daring Novelist said...

Ryan, thanks: I like to do money posts, and I'm worried that that will turn into a many post series...

Nicole: I started doing the minutes goal last summer. I was finishing up a long project and getting an accurate word count (as I'd add three words here, cut ten there) was more time consuming than it was worth.

The truth is, the minutes count -- as long as you exclude non-productive time -- makes it more like a job or other activity. You know how much you're putting into it. And you can plan for it and manage it.

Kim Switzer said...

I like the way you list how much time you spent writing each session. I think I might try this to see if having bigger numbers will make me want to sit down and write more. This is a great idea!

Have a great week--see you next time.

The Daring Novelist said...

Thanks, Kim --

Part of the secret is counting minutes, but the other is that this isn't the number of minutes spent in a session, it's the number of minutes actually working on the manuscript.

Usually that is accumulated through multiple sessions -- and more important, I stop the clock during a session when I do things like get up for a water or pause to play with the cat.