OK, firstly the bad news. My September Resolution was to write an average of 1,000 words of Alice every day and finish the first draft by the end of the month. I did not average 1,000 words a day and I did not finish Alice.

But now the good news.

Since records began (19th May this year) I have averaged 170 Words/Day(including September). However my average for just September alone is 275 Words/Day. So I my production (of words) has increased. I started writing Alice two years ago.  At the start of September I had 28% of Alice complete and now I have 74% complete.

As well as quantity we need to consider the quality of the writing. And on that front I have also made good progress during September. I cut out several scenes, rearranged others and generally tightened up the story quite a bit. The middle of the story was really going no where.

This has always been a problem for me. My beginnings are great. My endings are pretty good. But my middles tend to sag. Sometimes I loose the plot completely. And it is always the middle of the story where I tend to get bogged down.

So the good news is that I have upped my daily word count, improved the story and written an additional 46% of the novel. - Not a bad month’s work.

Note: I ment to publish this last week but I hit save instead of publish and only noticed today that the post wasn’t showing - silly me.

So after a day of cutting and pasting and generally rearranging chapters and scenes - and then rearranging them back to more or less where they started at - I now have a new design for Alice finished.

I’m pretty pleased with the result as it’s not everyday I go from having completed 49% of a project to being 66% complete without actually writing any new words. In fact I lost about 2,500 words in the reorganisation, so if I had of found a way to keep those half written scenes I would have even more of my project completed. But there was no way I could make them fit. I happily gave them up in order to get nearer the end of writing Alice.

So now I’m toying with the idea of starting a new art form the “Author as Performance Artist”. If I keep my readers entertained with amusing posts about the progress in my writing maybe I can build up a loyal readership - a readership that might even someday buy my books.

However I also risk destroying the mystique of the author by revealing all the changes and rewrites and plain mistakes that I make as I write. And also that I can get so fed up with writing a novel that I just want to get it finished by any means necessary(including cutting a quater of the storyline out of it) in order to have done with it once and for all.

OK - My resolution to write 1,000 words a day for the month of September and get my novel Alice finished has hit a little speed bump. I did no writing Sunday or Monday. Also I did very little on Saturday and Friday.

The reason I did no writing was, paradoxically,  because I had nothing else to do over the weekend except write. I was alone in the house(with my dog) for two whole days so what did I do? Did I knuckle down and write 10,000 words words of my novel. No I did not. Instead I “ran around like a headless chicken” writing a little bit of this story and a little bit of this story, writing a little scene, doing a little plotting, rearranging a couple of chapters. But in at the end I had no finished story, or chapter, or anything to really show for all the free time spend in front of the computer.

It is almost like some bizarre form of writers block, an analysis paralysis for the writer. Except instead of being overwhelmed with the amount of information coming into me I am overwhelmed with the amount of ideas I have for stories I should be writing.

Some Good News

My average word count for the first two weeks of September is 569. While this is somewhat short of my 1,000 words a day target it is much better than the 157 words/day I was averaging between 18th May (when I started to keep a daily word count) and the end of August. So my attempt at a target of 1,000 words/day is improving my overall productivity. And I can see no resulting drop in quality. When I’m writing 10,000 words a day I’ll see what the quality is

Back on Track

However my resolution was to finish Alice by writing 1,000 words a day. The main goal wasn’t just writing 1,000 words a day it was getting Alice finished by the end of the month. I now find, by a careful analysis of the chapter summaries I have for Alice that there are 3 chapters with basically nothing in them. If I remove 3 chapters from my novel I remove the need to write 15-20,000 words(I average 5-7,000 words/chapter.) So a little cut and paste, rewrite a couple of scenes and I only need 12,000 words to finish the story.

The only flaw with this plan is that I still need to write 1,000 words per day for the rest of the month. But it’s now the plan that I am working towards. We’ll see how far I get this time. You never know on the 28th I may realise that there is another chapter I don’t really need to make this story work

OK - not good news on making my 1,000 words a day goal.

On Sunday I wrote 475 words. But Monday I only added 53 words to Alice. And on Tuesday I did 0, yes zero, words. I got a bit blocked on a scene in chapter 3 and instead of switching to another part of the story I tried to work my way through it and wasted a day. On Wednesday I did what I should have done on Tuesday and stop working on the scene in Alice where I was blocked and I did 727 words. Unfortunately it was 727 words on another story. However I was writing again.

On Thursday I had to travel for work so I didn’t get too much time to write, but I did get 398 words written.

So far this week I’ve managed an average of 168 words/day. The bad news is I’m not reaching my target of 1,000 words/day, which I need if I am to have any hope of making a living as a writer. But the good news is that I am writing every day and still making progress.

Now I just have to focus on finishing Alice ASAP so that I have a finished novel I can sell.

Here is the summary of week one of my September Resolution to write 1,000 words a day and finish my novel Alice.

I wrote a total of 2,614 words which averages at 373.43 words per day. However only 1,718 words were in Alice the other 896 where on other stories. (I’ve actually lost count of the number of stories/novels I’m currently “working” on.) Either way I have not managed 1,000 per day.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can improve my daily word count is to get up earlier in the morning. I find that if I get an early start I can get a good bit done before the kids wake and the daily routines kick in. I’ve not been very successful in integrating my writing time into daily life. I have also tried staying up late but find I am often too tired to work properly.  So I’ll will have to make extra time by getting up earlier.

Now, I am not naturally an early riser. I have had to get up early in the past (5:30 - 6:00 am) but the longest I’ve managed to maintain it was 6-8 weeks. (You would think that after 6 weeks getting out of bed early would have become an ingrained habit, but not with me.) However now I know that I only have to become an early riser for 3 weeks, until I complete my September Resolution, and also that I am getting up to do something that I want to do (As opposed to previous periods of early rising where I was getting out of bed to commence a very long commute to work.) I am hoping that I will be able to get out of bed at 6:00am for the next 3 weeks. And that once out of bed(notice I don’t use the word awake) I will be able to do productive work.

I’ll let you know how it works out here on my blog. So subscribe to my RSS feed for updates.