Yesterday, I hit the three hundred day point in my writing streak – breaking my previous record by one hundred and one days. I wish I could say I hit such a significant milestone with a spectacular flourish but this week’s word count has been pretty low so far and I limped across the line with a meagre 454 words. Here’s a graph of what those three hundred days look like. (Click for a bigger version) The blue line is the number of words per day. It’s a bit spikey so I’ve added a seven day rolling average (the red line) to give a better sense of my general productivity. There’s clearly 4-5 blocks of time where I increased my productivity and a patch around the middle of the streak where my daily word count was consistently low. The green line is the overall total number of words. I ended up writing 199,407 words. That comes to 665 words a day which is down slightly from the 150 day mark (681 words per day) and the 100 day point (737 words per day). That’s probably due to the fact that I’m spending a lot of time revising which doesn’t contribute a lot of words to the total. Had I known how close I was to … Read More
Metrics Monday – 30th September 2013
Not a great week from a writing perspective, just 3,619 words. Most of my spare time was taken up with a new day job project. It isn’t the least productive week I’ve had but it’s close (I had a 3,196 word week six weeks ago). Still, I continued my writing streak (92 days and counting) and broke the 12,000 word mark on Glitch. I did spend a big chunk of time writing yesterday; revising and sending out my monster story, Saviour. That’s the eighth story I’ve written this year and I still have four more first drafts to revise. My total word count for the year is 111,072 words. I should easily smash through my previous record of 119,514 words set in 2010. Overall, my renewed focus on writing is making for a very productive year. More importantly, I’m really enjoying writing. More and more I’m choosing to write over TV or videogames, rather than having to force myself to put them aside. [Metrics Monday – 30th September 2013 by Philip Harris was first posted on Solitary Mindset on 30th September 2013]
Monday Metrics – 16th September 2013
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 … Read More
Monday Metrics – 9th September 2013
As expected, not a very productive week, writing wise, although at 3,923 words it’s not my least productive week and I hit day 70 in my writing streak. Apart from the one productive day on Tuesday, I’ve been limited to scraping together half an hour here and there to pound out a few paragraphs. What I have found is that limited time helps me focus and my words per hour rate is generally pretty good. I know I don’t have a lot of time so I don’t let myself get distracted. I worked on four stories this week, the final revisions of The Bone Boy, finishing off the first draft of In the Shadow of Memories, outlining and writing a new flash piece tentatively called The Ride and working on my monster story, Saviour. The Ride is out for feedback, Saviour still has a way to go and I’ve realised I need to rework a chunk of Memories. I also started doing some research for my next big project. It’s going to be busy week and I won’t be taking any time off so I’m expecting another low word count week but we’ll see how it goes. [Monday metrics – 9th September 2013 by Philip Harris … Read More
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