Last Tuesday I posted about trying to get myself to focus enough to finish some of the books I’d already started working on within a reasonable period – I would especially like to be able to have a print edition of the vampire duology I’ve been working on for the last year (or so) on hand at Phoenix Comicon at the end of May. I wrote all day (as well as I could) Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and Friday morning I wrote about my results, including a nice bar chart showing my daily word count dropping by almost half every day. Well, I’ve just finished work on the first draft of the duology (both books have a complete first draft), and here is the final chart for this part of the push:
As you can see, last Friday (day 4, above) I continued my diminishing returns, again writing about half as much as the day before. Then Saturday, before Mandy woke up (I like to spend her days off with my wife), I had a good rally, and Monday (day 6, above – I took Sunday off entirely) actually hit my word count goal (and chapter goal) for the day. In fact, all this week has been pretty good. Today would have been easier, but yesterday I got stressed out by AT&T early in my work day and ended up entirely losing my focus. (AT&T conveniently waited until I was done writing today to follow up with more stress.)
So, as predicted in my initial post, if I could get myself to focus and put in the work, I knew I could complete both of these books by the end of this week – which is what I did. I wasn’t able to maintain my focus (or a sane sleep schedule) as well as I’d have liked, or days 2-5 would probably have looked better, but I kept myself on task enough to get the project done by my artificial deadline. Now I just have all that other work to get to, starting with getting them ready for my first read, so I can do a quick pass for typos, then send them to my First Readers. Quoted from my G+ post:
If you would be interested in being a First Reader, please let me know. At this stage I’m looking for big-picture, story/content feedback. Does the story work, are the characters believable, are chapters x through xx too boring, whatever. Proofreading/copyediting/et cetera will be perfected at a later pass. Volunteer today!
I will also be looking for Beta Readers, probably some time next month. The more of them, the better. Looking for similar feedback, but the books should be in basically-final stage by then. Let me know if you think you’d be interested.
