Day 1003 - Finished the rough draft of book 6!

I finished book 6 in my Regency series! I actually took a nap in the middle of the day and then I felt a lot more refreshed afterward and got the last two chapters dictated. I finished doing the cleanup editing in the early hours of March 2nd, but I’m going to count it towards my writing for March 1st.

This book took a lot less time to write than the others, and I think it’s because of the dictation. I dictate into a digital voice recorder and then have Dragon transcribe it, and I am able to focus much more intently when I dictate because I can’t see what I wrote so I’m not distracted or trying to edit it. If I forget what I just dictated (which unfortunately happens a lot) I just repeat it and keep going. Often I’ll pause or repeat myself until a sentence comes out the way I want, but I think I’ve been doing that less often lately because the cleanup has taken a little less time lately, too (but the cleanup still takes, in general, the same amount of time it took me to do the dictation).

I won’t know my final statistics until I finish doing my last self-edit through the manuscript, right before I send it to my editor. The writing time will be less than other books since I only counted the dictation time, not the cleanup time. The cleanup is under editing rather than writing for this book. For books 4 and 5, I included the cleanup under writing because it’s the same as the editing-as-I-go that I do when I type, and I wanted to compare the writing speeds between dictation&cleanup versus typing. I didn’t feel the need to compare this time, so I’ll just compare the total time it took to write the book compared to the other books in the series.

I realized I never did the writing totals for books 4 and 5 in my series, so I decided to calculate them since I wanted to calculate my totals so far for book 6.

Totals:

Lady Wynwood's Spies, volume 5 totals:
Outlining: 15 hours, 40 minutes
Blocking: 133 hours, 19 minutes
Writing: 133 hours, 23 minutes
Editing: 37 hours, 54 minutes
Total hours: 320 hours, 16 minutes
Total word count: 143,886
Words/hour: 449

Lady Wynwood's Spies, volume 4 totals:
Outlining: 24 hours, 25 minutes
Blocking: 152 hours, 41 minutes
Writing: 213 hours, 27 minutes
Editing: 78 hours, 13 minutes
Total hours: 469 hours, 14 minutes
Total word count: 146,038
Words/hour: 311

Lady Wynwood's Spies, volume 3 totals:
Outlining: 8 hours, 41 minutes
Blocking: 42 hours, 16 minutes
Writing: 82 hours, 55 minutes
Editing: 37 hours, 25 minutes
Total hours: 171 hours, 17 minutes
Total word count: 83,811
Words/hour: 486

Lady Wynwood's Spies, volume 2 totals:
Outlining: 26 hours, 13 minutes
Blocking: 48 hours, 49 minutes
Writing: 84 hours, 44 minutes
Editing: 33 hours, 30 minutes
Total hours: 193 hours, 16 minutes
Total word count: 85,577
Words/hour: 438

Lady Wynwood's Spies, volume 1 totals:
Outlining: 153 hours, 48 minutes
Blocking: 0 hours, 0 minutes
Writing: 244 hours, 38 minutes
Editing: 74 hours, 43 minutes
Total hours: 473 hours, 9 minutes
Total word count: 108,572
Words/hour: 225

I was really slow on book 1, where I changed up the format of the series, turning it into an epic serial novel instead of a standard historical romance series, which is why my outlining time was so high, and my writing time was high because I wrote about 90,000 words on the book before deciding on the format change.

For book 4, my IBS was really bad for many months while I was writing the book. In looking at my time sheet, I see that I wrote for shorter periods of time each day, sometimes taking 2-3 weeks to finish a scene. I had noticed it before, but I think that when I stop in the middle of a scene, it ends up taking me longer overall to finish the scene because I have to try to pick up where I left off and figure out where I had been intending to go. When I write an entire scene in one sitting (or in one dictation session), I think it takes less time since I don’t have to try to catch myself up on what I had been doing before.

In contrast, book 5 took me about the same amount of time per word as books 2 and 3, I think because my IBS was starting to get better and I was getting better at working around my IBS so that I could work despite the discomfort.

So far, my totals for book 6 are:

Lady Wynwood's Spies, volume 6 totals:
Outlining: 15 hours, 45 minutes
Blocking: 30 hours, 14 minutes
Writing: 53 hours, 52 minutes
Editing: 54 hours, 23 minutes
Total hours: 154 hours, 15 minutes
Total word count: 102,253
Words/hour: 663

The writing hours are less than book 5, but the editing hours will be higher since I included my cleanup in with the editing time for book 6. I know I take anywhere from 20-30 hours to do my self-edit and to go through my editor’s notes, so I can expect about 30 hours added to my editing time. Even with that, book 6 will have taken me considerably less time (per word) than any other book in the series.

As for dictation, book 4 was almost entirely typing, book 5 was about 60% dictation and 40% typing, and book 6 was almost entirely dictation. It’s not enough data to really tell, but it seems like dictation really does increase my writing speed, even though my editing time increases and my average writing speed is only a little higher than with typing.

I think part of the reason might be that I significantly reduced my blocking time for book 6 by doing blocking with dictation. I was able to block a scene in considerably less time when I dictated the blocking instead of sitting down to try to type it out, maybe because I could come up with ideas faster while dictating, or maybe just because dictation is faster than typing. Also, for some scenes, I didn’t block the scene at all and just dictated it, and while my writing speed was a bit slower than when I properly block the scene first, I was still able to write the scene faster than when I type it.

If my books continue to be so long, it’s going to take me about 6 weeks for each book, assuming I put in about 5 hours a day, 6 days a week, in writing the book. If I only put in 4 hours a day, it’ll take me about 8 weeks per book, which still isn’t bad at all.

All that is assuming my IBS doesn’t act up, too, but I don’t even know how many weeks to pad that number because my IBS can affect me for only a week, or for several weeks.

Anyway, I had fun looking at my numbers. I’m such a nerd. It also made me happy to see that my writing speed has improved.

I thought about trying to increase the number of hours I work each day. Today was an outlier because I was almost done with the book—right now, I usually work less than 5 and I wanted to increase that to 8. But I think instead I’ll focus on trying to write two projects at once. Right now, about 4-5 days a week, I’m working for about 30-60 minutes on Year of the Dog (my Hawaii book) as well as my Regency series. Somehow that makes me feel less tired than trying to increase the number of hours I work on my Regency book, but I am still getting more hours of work done, just on a different book.

Eventually I’ll be able to increase the amount of time each day that I work on the Hawaii book, which will increase the number of hours I work each day (I hope). This is all still dependent upon my health, and I know I always have lots of hopeful plans when I’m feeling well, which fall to pieces when my IBS acts up. But lately I’ve been able to get work done despite my IBS, so I hope I can still keep moving forward and get more books published this year.

My takeaway for today: Dictation might actually help me write faster even though my writing speed of dictation+cleanup isn’t that much faster than typing alone, but the dictation might enable me to write scenes without blocking, and maybe reduce blocking time in general.