Musings on Economy of Scale

Thanks so much to everyone who cheered me on (and congratulated my word count!) during my Sunday Write-A-Thon yesterday! I lurve to spend a day with nothing on the agenda but words, so yesterday was a lot of fun. Mostly. But we'll get to that in a moment.

As I've mentioned, I'm on a 500-words-a-day goal for this book. I pushed myself harder for my last book, partly because I felt I should simply because Other People Could (dumb) and partly because I was writing adult and writing long, which meant that most days I felt like I would never freaking finish!!! (Final word count on that one ended up at 118K, though I've come to terms with the fact that it needs a good rewrite.)

Somewhere along the way of writing that book, I lost my sense of balance. I became too focused on getting published and forgot about all the living I needed to do in the intervening years. Family and friends would invite us out and, I swear, my gut reaction was a sort of keening noise followed by the thought, "But that time could be spent writing!"

Yeah. That's not how you stay sane, people. Not as an unpublished writer, anyway. If you've got deadlines to meet, that's a different story.

With this book, I'm trying to keep the pendulum swinging in a tight range more or less at the middle of the time management arc: words written every day at a pace that will get the book finished sooner rather than later, but will still allow me enough time for novel activities such as: reading! spending guilt-free time with my husband, family, and friends! having--gasp!--free time occasionally!

So far, it's working. :D

I found yesterday's Write-A-Thon interesting on a couple of fronts, though: A. I was absolutely certain I would benefit from an economy of scale by writing for a whole day--and I didn't and, B. even when I love writing, I sometimes don't love writing.

A. Monday through Friday, I typically get my 500 or so words in in about an hour and a half, total: two twenty minute bus rides, plus forty or so minutes of my lunch hour, plus maybe a half hour or so at night. All of those sessions have what we in the Process Engineering biz (my Day Job!) call "process fragmentation" costs associated with them, so I'm not fully capitalizing on any of the timeframes I mentioned. I'm starting up and shutting down my laptop, I'm remembering where I last left off, etc.

I thought that if I wrote for a whole day, largely uninterrupted, I would write at a rate faster than 500 words per 90 minutes. Turns out? Not so much. I wrote 2709 words in about eight hours, but during that time I took breaks for lunch and snacks, and read several chapters of a book when my motivation flagged. Loosely rounding, i still wrote at about 500 words per 90 minutes. I think. Honestly, I'm really bad at math, so I could be embarasing myself here. But anyway, assuming I'm right, I found that statistic both extremely interesting and somewhat disappointing.

This book wants to be written thoughtfully and carefully. I get it. :)

B. I'd started the day with a 2k word goal in mind. Once I checked my trusty spreadsheet, I realized I needed to write closer to 3K to get even with myself. Over the course of the day, I ranged the gamut (wtf does that mean, anyway??) from "I'M GOING TO OWN YOU, WORD COUNT GOAL! YOU WON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT HIT YOU BY THE TIME THIS DAY IS THROUGH!!" to "Okay, this is good. I'm doing fine. Slow and steady wins the race." to actually saying these words out loud to my husband: "There's no way I'll make 2688 but I'm determined to at least hit 2K."

The most interesting thing, to me, was that it wasn't a straight progression, which I could at least chalk up to fatigue. I was up and down and all over the place. I know that I hit an easy patch (meaning the words were flowing and I got caught up in the story) right around 2200 that carried me right up until the end. I checked my word count in the middle of that and I knew I'd make my stretch goal for the day--and at that moment, I felt like I could write 3K! No, 4K! TEN THOUSAND WORDS WOULD BE MINE!!!!

That was crazytalk, natch, but I did have a little rush of motivation there at the end. I just find it so interesting that no matter how deeply I love the holistic art of writing, the act, itself, continues to be a struggle at times. I think that's a mind-bendingly odd concept, but it's one I need to remember for when I hit those rough patches along the way.