Tuesday, December 1, 2015

There's Always Next Year

Nope. Not winning NANOWRIMO this year. Didn't even make it to 10,000 words. Kind of hard to feel motivated to write when you've got flu-like symptoms and feel like a wet dishrag for half the month. But there will be next year and I'll be ready.

I did get blog posts written for the beauty blog. If I counted those, I probably did get past 10,000 words but definitely didn't make 50,000. 

Being sick has also gotten my sleep schedule way off. The only way to live through it was to sleep through the morning. Lots of sleep helped but now I'm left with the habit of sleeping the morning away. Things are slowly working back toward normal but since my writing stride has been in the morning since I've been off work, I really  need my mornings back.

I do feel like I've been in limbo this month - more so than the entire last year. Limbo isn't a very nice place and it gets boring. Hopefully, I've had my major yuck for the rest of the year and can now enjoy the Christmas season.

It's raining as I write this. And yes, I am crazy but I would love to see some snow right now. We did have a bit of the white stuff a week or so ago but it wasn't enough. I need that full blanket at least once. 

But back to the subject - aside from illness, I think there's another reason I didn't make the 50,000 word goal. I didn't take the time to plan what I was going to write. Since I hadn't planned to do NANO this year, no surprise there. Last year, I planned for NANO. I developed the story idea and was ready to write the scenes as soon as November 1st arrived. That's what I plan to do for next year. In fact, I'm going to start planning right now.

I am currently working on the first book in a trilogy, which means I will need to plan books 2 and 3 right alongside writing book 1. At this point, I have kind of put aside plans to do copywriting so I can concentrate on getting the first book out. 

I have set goals again, the first one being that book 1 of the trilogy will be a completed draft by the end of the year. One of my writing buddies and I worked it out last Wednesday when we met. I timed myself for one hour to see how many words I can crank out in an hour. We came up with an hourly goal with the idea that I'll be writing 4 hours a day. 

Haven't made the 4 hour a day goal yet, what with Thanksgiving last week and Black Friday and well, just getting myself back into the habit of daily writing. But this is the first day of a new month and with 31 days, if I can stick with 1500 an hour for 4 hours per day, even if I take weekends off, I'll have a 144,000-word draft completed by New Years Eve. 

Now, I know that sound ambitious but my true word count goal for the month is only 75,000 to 100,000. After all, every writer knows that just because you can write 1500 words in a one-hour sprint, doesn't mean you can maintain that speed over several hours of writing time. I will be happy if I can average 3000 to 4000 words in a 4 hour writing period. 

What I'm looking for now is that passive income that can be achieved by having something out there on Amazon. In fact, I've set a goal to have two books up on Amazon by Memorial Day. I already have a first draft ready for revisions, which means for the first quarter of 2016, I'll be in revision hell with two books.

Once I have the end of year goals met, I'll take a look at both projects, decide how much work will actually be involved and then possibly adjust that publishing goal. 

Meantime, I will still need some kind of income. Savings only goes so far, you know. I have come across a copywriting job that I find I truly enjoy. Product description. After all, that's what I do on the beauty blog. Why not get paid for it? 

December is going to be a busy month writing-wise, especially if you count all of the blog posts I've got planned for the beauty blog. I'll update here as I can but if you don't hear from me for the rest of the month, you can assume I'm writing up a storm.

Either that or I've crawled back into bed to hibernate for the month. Nah. I'd get too hot and too bored. Better to do the writing thing instead.


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