April Showers: A Writing Update

I mean to post this week about Liana Brooks’s new book Change Of Momentum, and about my new Inklet that’s out, When War Came To Town, but… Eh. It’s been one of those weeks. At least, however, the Instagram tour for Change Of Momentum is going well (check out the gorgeous pics here), and my kids have had vegetables every day, and we’ve done a longish walk twice around the pond every day, and no one’s gone house-mad just yet…

We won’t discuss the abominable amount of screen time we are *all* having, but anyway.

So. I’ll post about the new releases next week I guess.

Tonight, though, a quick update on April Showers!

I’m very pleased to announce that it’s going really, really well. At present, I have four of the ten stories complete. I could have had five, really, but I’ve been totally slack and not written yesterday or today. I’ll probably write a little bit now before I go to bed, just to get the fifth story under way, but I’m getting headachy from too much screen time and too many late nights, so we’ll see. I’ll probably just do a ten minute sprint and see what happens. Ten minutes, my stats spreadsheet informs me, should be somewhere between 300 and 500 words, so that’s not terrible.

Since I started this project on the 8th, I’ve written about 17,500 words. That’s seven days of writing o.O Can I write this fast all the time?

(Answer: yes, but only if I had at least half a day to sit around and make the wording happen.)

Actually, that’s one pleasing and unexpected corollary of this experiment. I had hoped, based on past experience, that it would become easier each day to sit down and get the words done (it is, but not as quickly as I’d expected, see: no writing today or yesterday). I’d hoped, again based on past experience, that it would feel like less of a strain to reach a “decent” word count each day (that’s definitely happening; I wrote an entire 2300 word story in three hours procrastinating in front of the TV on Tuesday night, and it barely felt like an effort).

What I wasn’t expecting was that my words per minute speed is actually gradually increasing. I don’t think I’ve actually written this much this quickly since the last time I tried NaNoWriMo (2011, I think?), and what I’m doing is much more careful, considered type of writing than NaNo was for me. So I didn’t really expect it, but I suppose it makes sense: not only am I training my brain to focus on writing more regularly, I’m training it to produce words more efficiently too.

Needless to say, I am super, super happy about this and long may it continue 😀

So, here’s the current stats! I have a fun post scheduled for tomorrow, but if things go well, I’ll check back in again in the evening and let you know how tomorrow goes (since I have to start and finish a story by bedtime tomorrow to stick to my schedule).

Love In The Time Of Corona: contemporary romance, 5987 words

Crystalline And Bright: contemporary fantasy (coming of age), 4557 words

Moon And Morning, Offer Scorning: contemporary YA fantasy, 6192 words

As Time Whirls Slowly Past: contemporary, 2338 words.

I think I’m going to try something secondary-world next, either fantasy or sci fi or a combination of both. Who knows?! We’ll see what happens in the morning 😀

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