1st Week Status

Well, so far, so good.
I have been writing for a week, which given my every-other-day schedule means that I've had four one-hour sessions. Out of that I have gotten 7,851 words, averaging 1,962 words per session - not bad.
As you might guess from my word count, I'm sticking with the NaNoWriMo style first draft: just write. And write. And write. And save the re-writing for later.
The advantage of this is that once momentum has been established, the words, ideas, and action flow fairly naturally.
The disadvantage is that it's hard to know whether what you're writing is good or horrible. It also means that going back and fixing things up later will probably take rather more work.
Still, overall I think it works fairly well for me. I'll just have to have faith that it isn't all crap.

Although it's only the end of the first week, I think I'm going to adjust my schedule to 4 times per week (preferably approximately every-other-day). If I stick with strictly every-other-day I'll get 3-4 hours in each week, depending on the week, and they'll keep scooting around. Given that my schedule makes writing on some days considerably easier than others, such scooting around isn't really such a good thing.

On to the second week! I'm hoping to get my protagonist into some difficulties this week . . . .

Writing and Life

As of tomorrow, I will begin my grand experiment in sustainable writing. Hopefully I will actually get a book out of the experience - we'll see.

I'm not going into this completely cold: I've had a few radical writing months with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Writing 50,000+ words in a month has its own advantages, but the major disadvantage is that you get to the end of the month and are burned out and behind on life. Or at least I have been, in each of my three experiments with it (once during the official month, and a couple times on my own).

It's amazing how difficult it is to write for even an hour a day, what with a full-time job, cooking, cleaning, bills, and the desire to do something other than write. To be fair, I could pull it off if I gave up reading, and used my reading time for writing instead . . . .

But this is an experiment in sustainable writing, and giving up reading pretty much nixes the sustainable bit.

So, my goal:
Write for one hour every other day. Faithfully.

My hope is that this will be enough to keep momentum, but little enough that I can actually live with it over the course of months.

Theoretically I think I should be able to have a rough draft in 2-3 months, a second draft in another 2-3 months, and maybe something I'm willing to show to someone else at the end of 6 months (total) or so. A sensible creature might pick up work on an existing manuscript - of which I have a handful, courtesy of NaNoWriMo - but I am not a sensible creature. Hopefully I will get back to my neglected orphans at some point, but at the moment I want to see whether I can just begin at the beginning and keep going until I have a working draft.

Wish me luck!