As I mentioned in the beginning of the year in a post about my writing goals, I plan on writing 200,000 words of fiction in 2013. While that sounds like a lot, it's actually only 550 words a day. Quite doable. I even put a counter at the very bottom of this blog to keep myself motivated.
Now that we're a third of the way through the year, how am I doing? Well, as you can see I'm only a little over a quarter of the way to my goal. A nonfiction project took up a great deal of my time, and then I took a week off while I was traveling in Estonia. So yes, I'm behind, but with almost 52,000 words written I still feel pretty good.
I'm also speeding up. When you commit to writing fiction every day, your daily word count increases, and the words flow better. In July I'm spending two weeks on a writing retreat in Tangier to work on a novel set there. I'll only be writing: no email, no music, and I won't answer phone calls except from family. If I'm not caught up by then, that break in Morocco will certainly get me caught up!
Wow 200,000 is a serious amount! I struggle with 2000 words a day, and that's just blogging my random thoughts :)
ReplyDeleteActually, I wanted to ask, would you be interested in having a chat about promoting your writing on a social media site called Blurtit.com that I’m launching? We’re a Q&A platform – and I’m really keen to get some talented bloggers involved in our community before we roll out to the rest of the world.
If you’re interested, please email me at kass@blurtit.com and I’ll send you an invite code to have a snoop around the site!
Great goal and advice. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteI bet you'll be way past your mark with two whole weeks of writing. Good stuff, Sean!
ReplyDeleteI'm taking the first two weeks of June off this summer, with the sole purpose of finishing the next Commando book. I agree that sometimes, just shutting everything down and writing in a controlled environment is what's necessary to get words on the page.
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