Today I crossed the 10k mark for my newest project, Into the Nebulous Deep. It’s a little bit behind in terms of nanwrimo, but I’m confident it will be on par before the end of the week. I wrote 2.6 words today, and I’m hoping to keep that fairly steady as I move on into the month.
Since I’m between jobs at the moment, I’m hoping to get my daily word counts up to between 4k and 5k and keep it there consistently. Sounds daunting, but I know it’s possible because I did it back in June and July of 2009. If I could enjoy that kind of productivity again, that would be awesome.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken a good, hard look at my routine from that time to figure out how I did it. Here are some of the key things that stood out to me:
1) I was waking up each morning in a timely manner.
2) I was exercising regularly.
3) I was splitting my time between two projects (one revision, one drafting).
4) I would leave my apartment and go somewhere else to write.
5) I had a short ritual I’d go through to focus myself on the project.
Of these, I think the most important were 1, 2, and 3. A strong, early start to the day is always helpful, and exercising is not only good for you physically, it boosts your creativity for a short period of time as well. For that reason, I recently bought a pair of good running shoes and started running. Today was the first day, and it felt great!
Three was the most surprising, because whenever I was busy with school, I found it impossible to juggle two projects at once. But out of school, it makes sense: work on the first one until you hit a rough patch, then shift gears and work on the other until you find what you need to pick up the first one again. It helps to exercise two parts of the brain, so juggling between revision and drafting t is probably for the best.
As for going somewhere else, I’m reluctant to do that since my only other computer is a tiny little netbook–but if things get rough, you may start seeing me around the Provo Library more often. I remember over the summer, this one chapter in Worlds Away from Home was just killing me, so I took my netbook to the Provo river trail, sat down on a bench, and muscled my way through it. It surprised me how quickly I punched through it–because if I were at my apartment, I know it would never have gotten done. It was just too tough.
The last one was kind of a quirky little thing for the second draft of Mercenary Savior (I called it Bringing Stella Home back then), but it would be a good idea to do the same with these other projects. For Mercenary Savior, it involved watching the opening credits of Fistful of Dollars. For Into the Nebulous Deep, I’m not sure what the ritual will be, but whatever it is I’ll make it awesome–without spending too much time on it.
So anyways, that’s what’s going on on the writing front. In response to a nibble from an agent, I’m doing a fifth draft of Genesis Earth, but I haven’t gotten past the first chapter (which I posted). Soon, I’d like to be doing about 2k to 2.5k on Nebulous Deep per day, and 2k to 2.5k in the revision of Genesis Earth.
There’s more, but I’m starting to fall asleep at my keyboard, so it’s time to wrap this up and post it. Keep up the writing, nano-ninjas, and good luck!
