Day 721: Switching to half writing/blocking

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I got a really late start today. First I woke up late because I had a hard time falling asleep last night (despite going to bed early), then I was slowed down by some IBS discomfort after breakfast (not caused by breakfast, but by something else I ate a week ago). As a result, I lost about an hour of time I could have done work before lunch.

I am starting to wonder if my method of bare minimum writing each day has caused the pacing of the story to slow down. The book is already at 80,000 words and I’m only at about 60% of the way through. I’m not really worried about what the total word count will be since I don’t have to adhere to a traditional publisher's guidelines for word count (which are usually to accommodate paperback production). However, I am worried that maybe I’ve added too much detail to the scenes so that they’re a bit bloated, which will slow reading pace and make the narrative seem bogged down.

I think I won’t know if that’s true until I do the overall self-editing pass that I do after the entire rough draft is written. The reason I outline and block each scene is so that resultant scenes are tight and well-structured. While that’s usually the case, I haven’t done this sort of bare minimum writing each day before. Since I only write 100-200 words in the story at a time, I’m wondering if I’m not as aware of the overall pacing of the scene structure.

Because of this, I have decided to switch from doing only the bare minimum of writing and mostly blocking, to doing about half and half writing and blocking. I had originally wanted to spend the majority of my time each day doing blocking so that I can finish blocking the entire series sooner, because that way I won’t get confused when I have to keep jumping from one time point in the storyline to another when I switch from writing to blocking.

But not only have I started having concerns about the scene pacing, but also if I only do a little writing each day, I won’t release any books this year, and I don’t want to do that. It would be best if I could release at least books 4 and 5 this year, which I had blogged a little about yesterday.

So in order to get a better handle on the scene pacing as I write, to produce more books this year, and yet to still continue blocking the series as fast as is feasible, I decided to go halves. One and a half to two hours writing, and a roughly equal amount of time blocking each day.

When I do my next series, I am DEFINITELY doing the blocking first before I start writing the books. That way I won’t run into this kind of problem again.

Even though I got a late start today, and I had a marketing obligation that took a little time, I was still able to get all my work done before dinner. I couldn’t get to my Japanese study until after dinner, but I still managed to get it done for the day. In fact, I spent a little too long at it because I’m trying to read a Japanese light novel that was already fan-translated and comparing my translation with the fan translation to see how close I get. The light novels I really want to read are not fan-translated, but since I’m still working on my Japanese language skills, I thought I’d read this one first so I can still get exposure to Japanese, but I can check my work.

I feel like I got a lot done today, so I’m rather proud of myself. The only problem is that I didn’t get as much reading done today, and I know that when I don’t read enough fiction, it starts to affect my writing and my motivation. I’ll have to try to get up earlier tomorrow and also make sure I make time for reading.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 11 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 34 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 1487 words

Writing streak: 200 days

Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Blocking: Total number of words: 1639 words

Blocking streak: 194 days

Hawaii series:

Editing: Time spent: 8 minutes

Writing: time spent: 17 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 203 words

Writing-related business:

Regency research reading: time spent: 54 minutes

Email: time spent: 24 minutes

Marketing: time spent: 18 minutes

My takeaway for today: Switch to half writing and half blocking, increasing my writing time so that I can better grasp the pacing of the scene as I write it and to release books faster.

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