Writing progress going well · 7:34pm Feb 26th, 2015
Working on "Last Draconequus" right now. It's... much bigger than I expected (I should be used to this by now... :-( ) The chapter is close to 9,000 words now and I think it's about two thirds done. But I'm making good progress... since I started on the new med regime I have worked my way up to an average of 2300 words a day, and am shooting to get up to an average of 2500.
The problem with 2500 words a day, of course, is that it is not a lenient pace. At all. I have never pulled it off for a significant length of time. When I was working on Only Human chapter 4, I was in what I call a white heat, writing feverishly, obsessing over the story, waking up alert in the morning because yay, I get to write some more... I've fought to recapture that to no avail over the years (that was in 2009), and that brought me to 60,000 words in the month of Jan, or not quite 2K a day. I managed about that same rate in Oct-Dec 2013 when I first got into ponyfic, though there was no one story that was burning me up then -- instead I wrote a whole pile of them (and left the longer ones unfinished, a legacy that now I have to deal with. :-))
If I can do this, and maintain it, it will be the best I've managed in possibly my whole life... but it's a grueling pace because it makes little allotment for the days I have no spoons for writing at all. 2500 isn't much time for me -- takes me maybe an hour and a half -- but if I don't put in more than that on the days I can, the days I can't write at all will destroy my average. This is why I'm forced to work my way up to the average rather than just doing it.
So if my estimates are correct and I maintain my pace I should be done with Chapter 3 of Last Draconequus in 2 days or so. This puts me slightly behind my "best-time" predictions but on the basis of wordcount being higher than estimated, which is a better reason for slippage than output lower, and besides, best-time predictions have always been kind of pie in the sky anyway.
I wish thee the best of luck with that 2500!~
Good luck! Can't wait for the next chapter.
God, I could never work to a schedule like that. I just write what I have the passion for at the time. If I woke up in the morning and decided that I was going to finish off House of Chaos, for example, I'd probably end up spending the whole day playing Dark Souls.
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It doesn't always work. The last time I tried to work on Last Draconequus, I got stuck at about 3,000 words, mindlessly surfed the internet a lot, felt guilty, and finally decided to switch to Not the Hero instead and drop Last Draconequus until I felt like I could move forward on it.
It helps that I write very, very quickly when I'm actually writing, so if I do things like track my progress with pretty charts and KPIs and Excel formulas that tell me how awesome I'm doing, I can get a quick and fairly profound shot of dopamine reward from completing my goal... as long as I'm willing to do things like outline in excruciating detail so I never hit the dreaded "oh god, what happens now?", and switch projects if I'm not making headway with the one I'm on. However, I've never in my life actually done as well as I'm doing right now, even for two weeks (which is the length of time I've managed to keep it up so far), so I don't know if I'll manage to keep up with it.