After a slow start, last week turned out to be very productive – 7,267 words. That’s my second most productive week of the year, my best being the 8,871 word week I managed at the beginning of August.
The first couple of days went how I expected, very low word counts, but on Wednesday evening I found myself home alone and hammered out a respectable 1,436 words on my monster story, Saviour. My Thursday and Friday sessions also went better than expected and I was able to wrap up the first draft.
I’d realised I needed to make some changes to In the Shadow of Memories so I did those on Saturday morning which meant all my in-progress stories were at the first draft stage and I needed something new.
I’ve been toying with an idea for an episodic science fiction novella for a while. I had a very rough outline and the opening 3-400 words but not a lot else so I spent about two and a half hours on Saturday doing a much more detailed outline. The structure is fairly complicated so I ended up having to use a spreadsheet. By the time I’d finished I had the structure sorted and roughly a third of the detailed outline.
Sunday started badly. For some reason I was in a vaguely disgruntled mood and wasn’t really interested in doing anything constructive. I fiddled around with the novella outline for a while but then decided I would try writing the first chapter and see how I got on. I had enough of the outline and a clear enough idea of what I wanted to get from the first chapter so I figured I could get down a few hundred words.
In fact, I ended up spending over four hours writing, wrote about 2,900 words, finished the first chapter and completely dispelled the disgruntled feeling that had been haunting me. For now the novella is known as Glitch and I’m pretty excited about how it’s shaping up so far.
At the moment this week is looking fairly open as far as writing time goes. But I do need to work on the Glitch outline some more, otherwise I’m going to lose my momentum.
[Monday Metrics – 16th September 2013 by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 16th September 2013]