Day 551: 30 day writing streak

As of today, I’ve written every day for 30 days in a row! it was really hard on days when I wasn’t feeling well, but I set a low daily minimum of 100 words, which was easy to hit no matter how I was feeling.

I don’t yet have a reward system for my streak milestones, which I know I really need. At the moment, I’m motivated to keep up my streak simply because I don’t want to break it, since I know it will probably depress me if I do.

Since I don’t have a reward system yet, I just made a 30-day writing streak badge for myself. I’ll post this on my Daily Writing Blog sidebar.

I had a marketing event today, a Facebook party thrown by an author friend of mine and the other authors in the box set she belongs to. These kinds of things are great because I get to meet new readers, but the party itself is really easy because I can write my posts in advance and then post one every 30 minutes. My biggest beef is how hard it is to respond to replies, because Facebook doesn’t make it easy to notice when someone has replied to my reply.

I wasn’t sure how much work I would get done since the party lasted 4 hours and I was feeling a bit tired afterward, but I really wanted to do my writing today and get my streak!

Writing speed, editing

In light of what I wrote about yesterday, about writing a cleaner first draft, I tried not to pressure myself to write fast today. And yes, I know I’ve said this before, but I need to stop focusing so much on my writing speed.

I know why I focus so much on speed. It’s because I want to write faster so that I can release books faster. I have been having so many sick days, it’s been hard to get any progression on my book. It’s feeling like this book will take forever.

But I noticed that my editing was more detailed today because what I’d written the day before was pretty clean. I had written research notes for myself, but otherwise nothing else, so I could focus on tightening my prose and making the small changes that polish the roughness out of the writing. If it had been messier, I don’t know that I’d have been able to do that detailed a job on the self-editing.

I also admit that, maybe because I was tired after the marketing event, it was hard to get into the writing. My brain felt very fuzzy and tired, so I didn’t do more than about 30 minutes of writing. I probably should have cut it shorter than that, but I was having issues with a particular passage and wanted to fix it.

So my writing speed today is very slow. A part of me is sad about that, but I need to remember that better, more detailed editing will give me a better final product.

Also, I’m remembering that writing book that talked about polishing garbage. I don’t think writing fast necessarily produces garbage writing for every writer, but it certainly does for me if I rush through without a thought to word choice and punctuation and grammar and sentence cadence. Since I hate revision so much, editing that mess just tends to make me more sloppy on my revision work. Writers who excel at revision don’t have to worry about that and can write as messy as they want.

I took a bathroom break after writing the above, and I remembered that ultimately, my book’s release is in God’s hands. So I don’t have to worry about how slowly I’m writing. I just need to keep pushing on.

That thought actually makes me feel a whole lot better.

***

Editing: Time spent: 16 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 34 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 429 words

Writing: Overall writing speed: 750 words/hour

Writing streak: 30 days!!!

Blocking: time spent: 38 minutes

Blocking streak: 24 days

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 31 minutes

My takeaway for today: I have to remember that God will take care of my book’s release, and I shouldn’t worry so much about my writing speed.