Day 645: Goal setting

Now that I’m starting to feel better, I have the luxury to start thinking about my publishing goals (as opposed to simply trying to write despite feeling like crap). At 500 words a day, it would take me over 6 months to write a 100,000 word novel, which means I would only publish 2 books a year.

So I decided to increase my daily word goal to 800 words. As long as I am healthy, that will enable me to write 100,000 words in about 4 months, which would be 3 books a year. It’s the number of books I want to release each year at minimum, although I would prefer to release 4 or 5 books a year.

At the moment, I think I can handle writing 800 words a day now that I’m starting to feel a little better and also since I’m learning to better manage my pain and work around it. After realizing that I could release 3 books a year if I up my word count, I’m also very motivated to push myself a little harder, which might help me be disciplined about doing those 800 words.

Yesterday, I was really distracted and procrastinated a lot so it took me a long time to get 800 words. But I think on average I can get 800 words done in 90 minutes, and that’s very doable right now. I can spend 30 minutes or so editing, 90 minutes writing, and 2-3 hours blocking.

(I am trying to concurrently block the rest of the books in the same series, so the majority of my writing time each day is spent doing that. I don’t know a lot of writers who do the kind of pre-writing/blocking that I do, but even though it takes some extra time, it enables me to write the scene faster with less wasted time trying to figure out what to write. So I can’t just set a higher word count goal for each day because I also need to get the blocking done for each scene before I write it.)

If I start to feel well again and can build up to consistently working 5-6 hours a day, I can increase my daily word count goal. I would love to release more books per year. But since I’m still not feeling 100%, I’m not yet working a full day on a consistent basis.

For now, I’ll see how I do with 800 words a day.

***

It was hard for me to focus today, too. I woke up late, and got started working late, and then It took me at least half an hour before I could really focus intently—until then, my mind was rather distracted. I think I just need to practice deep focus more.

But once I did start to focus, I was surprised at how I lost track of time. I even wrote more than 800 words.

Also, I set my alarm to chime every hour and I did 1 minute of breathing, and that did seem to help me focus a bit better.

***

I took a break after writing and got distracted again, this time by cooking prep. I probably could have put it off until after I did my work for the day, but I just didn’t think about that option and got it done right then. However, thoughts about this cooking prep that needed to be done were nagging me when I first sat down to write, so maybe it was better just to get it out of the way so I won’t think about it anymore. I’m really terrible at putting non-urgent things aside for later and not thinking about them. Maybe I should have just done it right away so the thought of it wouldn’t nag at me while I was working.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 5 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 1055 words

Writing streak: 124 days

Blocking: time spent: 56 minutes

Blocking streak: 118 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 1 hour, 41 minutes

My takeaway for today: Increase daily word count goal to 800 to try to finish 3 books a year.

My second takeaway for today: Setting my alarm to chime every hour and doing 1 minute of breathing each time seems to help me focus a bit better.