You’ve heard of The Thirty-Nine Steps? Well, I am embarking today on The Thirty-Nine Days, a headrush of an adventure to meet two upcoming deadlines. One is October 15th, one is November 5th. If you’ll look at my Dave’s Whizmatronic Widgulating Calibrational Scribometer on the left sidebar, you’ll see where I am, and what I have in store. And in case you’re wondering, no, I did not come to this place by goofing off.
I got here by having a previous book require extensive revisions, and one of the current books refusing to play nice with plot. The plan is to write 3250 FINAL (not fast) draft words (or approximately 13 pages) each day for the next thirty-nine days. 3250 x 39 = 126,750! And that’s all I need to finish both books. Fortunately, both stories are complete in my head, so it’s just a matter of getting down the words. Easy peasy, right?
To this end, a few things must happen.
1) Sleeping. I know a lot of authors write late into the night, or round (around?) the clock. I can’t do that. I have to sleep. I don’t always sleep well, but I must have the downtime. No squeezing blood from a turnip, and all that.
2) Eating. I forget. I get involved in the page and several hours have passed, and no wonder my brain is fried. It has no fuel. I gave up sugar at the beginning of the month, and already have so much more clarity, no sluggishness, so good food from here on.
3) Focusing without distractions. I use Brain Power:
http://www.brainsync.com/shop/brain-power-1.html
4) Going Amish. Explanation found here:
http://www.alisonkent.com/blog/2012/04/01/a-is-for-amish/
5) Timed Writing. Dividing the number of words I need each day into timed writing sessions keeps me on track. A polished page an hour means a 13 hour day. Two polished pages an hour means a 6.5 hour day. Like calories in, calories out, it’s all about the math!
Having put that out there, it’s now time to be accountable. If I can, I’ll post daily updates. If I can’t, it’s because I’m sleeping, or eating, or focusing, or Amish, or writing!
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Thanks for the update. While I enjoy my visits to your blog, what’s most important to
me is that you take care of yourself and continue to write must read books.
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Thanks, Mary. I feel bad that I’ve fallen off the face of the earth here on the blog. It’s easy to dash off a few words on Twitter or share links on Facebook, but these days all my writing has gone into the book instead of blog posts. I’m going to try to get back here, though, even if I just post short things!