Day 909 - Book 5 is done!

I happened to have the cover for book 5 ready, so here it is!

I usually don’t write on Sundays, but I was almost done with the book and wanted to finish it, plus I wanted to get the book to my editor ASAP because I was behind on the time frame I told her it would be ready. I only had one short scene to write, so I just decided to push through and get it done.

I haven’t blogged for a few days mostly because not much has happened in terms of writing productivity. I’ve had some IBS issues (as usual), but I managed to get about 3 hours of writing done each day. I even did writing on Thanksgiving by getting up extra early, but to be honest, we didn’t have a big gathering so there wasn’t much cooking do to for just my family, and my husband did the turkey, which was probably the most labor intensive.

I had been hoping to develop more writing stamina and write for more hours each day, but I haven’t been able to get more than about 3 hours every day before I start feeling tired. Part of it is because sometimes I’ll get some nausea or cramping from my IBS while I’m writing, and that’s really distracting, so I’ll cut my writing time short because I’m not feeling well. Even when the IBS issues finally die down, I feel rather tired since my body had been suffering symptoms for a few hours earlier.

I guess I’ll just have to keep trying to work for longer hours. Even if my IBS is miraculously gone one day, it’s not like I’ll be able to suddenly do a full day of work. I have to build up my writing stamina now, while the IBS isn’t crippling.

I also can’t wait and hope for a time when the IBS is all better, because that might never happen. I have to figure out how to work around the IBS now, expecting that I’ll have to work around it for the rest of my life.

That’s kind of depressing, but I keep thinking that God wanted me to struggle with this for a reason I don’t understand, and I just have to trust Him to know what He’s doing. If I keep thinking like that, it help me not to get bitter or sad, but to remain hopeful and positive, and I think that kind of mindset helps with my writing motivation and productivity a lot. I suffered from depression before, but God helped me through it, and I don’t want to devolve into that kind of suffocating mindset again.

Because of a couple bad IBS flareups, finishing this book took 4 months, which was longer than I had hoped, and I feel kind of guilty that I couldn’t meet my own self-imposed deadline. However I also think that having that deadline is what got me in trouble—it made me really stressed and panicky because I wanted to meet the deadline, and I think that made it harder for me to relax and just get to work. If I can help it, I don’t want to have to make another deadline again. I’ll just write as much as I can and put out the books when they’re ready.

While I’m trying to increase the number of hours I work each day, even 3 hours of writing a day is about 3000 words, and I could get a 100,000 word book done in less than 2 months—5-6 weeks for the writing, and assuming blocking and editing took about a week each. I think that’s pretty respectable. However, I would need to be extra strict on my diet so that I don’t have bad IBS flareups like I did while writing this last book, because it’s what made it take extra long. Even when my diet is strict, I always seem to have some sort of IBS discomfort, but as long as the cramping and nausea isn’t too bad, I could get about 3 hours of writing done a day and get a book done in 2 months (or a couple weeks longer if the book is more than 100,000 words, like my last two books have been).

It seems to help when I make it a goal to complete the scene for the day. It sometimes motivates me to push through the pain a little bit more just to finish the scene. Almost all my scenes are at least 2000 words, and some scenes were as long as 7000 words (I suppose I could have broken the scene up into 2 pieces), so having a goal to finish a scene ensures I write a good chunk of time. The only time I don’t finish a scene is if I’m feeling too sick and its distracting me from concentrating.

Now I only need to do the self-editing on the book and then get it to my editor. The self-editing is painful since I hate it so much, but my prose is pretty clean so it shouldn’t be too bad.

Now that I’ve gone back to typing instead of dictating, I might also go back to doing the “cycling” edit that I was doing before, which was to do an edit of the scene I wrote the day before, then starting the writing for the day. “Cycling” back to do the edit of the rough prose I just wrote enables me to write quickly when I’m laying down the prose, just leaving notes for myself for research, and then cleaning up my prose and doing the research needed on the next day of writing. I’m left with a super clean book when I finish the last scene. (I’d heard the term “cycling” from a writer friend, but I found out recently that the term might have been coined by Dean Wesley Smith, a prolific science fiction writer.)

Anyway, I did some self-editing today, and hopefully can finish the edit in the next day or two.

Writing streak: 388 days

My takeaway for today: Even self-imposed deadlines make me panicky and stressed, so it might be better not to have them at all and just write and publish as I can.

My second takeaway for today: While I’m trying to increase my writing stamina and write more hours a day, even 3 hours/3000 words a day is perfectly respectable since I could get a book out in about 2 months.

My third takeaway for today: Making it a goal to complete a scene a day seems to help motivate me to push through the IBS pain a little more just to finish the scene.