For those who don’t follow me on Twitter, I recently tweeted that I had booked off a week from work so that I could 100% focus on my writing. I will doing very little else for that week other than writing. My goal? To at least double my word count for my latest writing project. How much is that you ask? I currently have around 50,000 words. This means by the end of that week, I should (if all goes as planned) around or over 100,000 words.
I have dubbed this week “Writing Week”.
Let’s start with why I am doing this.
I used to have a lot of time to write back when I was a student, whilst my modules and courses used to be pretty hard, my timetable was not. I still remember that joyous autumn term when I had two days of lectures a week, and 5 days of freedom. Granted, those two days were jammed packed with lectures and labs, and in the evenings I used to cram and do all my assignments and lab reports in the evenings so that the following 5 days were mine, and mine alone.
I got a butt-load of writing done that term! It was awesome, and I loved it. Two days of uni, 5 days of reading, writing and playing videos games. What a life, eh?
But jump forward to after I graduate and have a fiancee (very soon to be wife!), full-time job and the fact that writing is not my only project anymore. I maybe have 30minutes to an hour of writing per day, if I’m lucky. Very lucky!
And I miss it.
I miss diving so deep into my writing, I can lose track of time to the point of my looking at the clock and thinking “How the hell is it 3am?!”. Yes, that actually happened once!
Basically, there aren’t enough hours in a day, or hours in a week (more specifically, weekend!) for me to completely focus on all my projects. Some might say I have too many projects on, and some may agree with you, but when I try and think which ones I want to scrap to make more time, I cannot decide which one I like less. So I don’t.
That is what this week is for. I am benching all my other projects for 9 days, and completely focusing on the book I am currently writing. Having said this, I will not be limiting myself to just this story, if I get inspired to start another short story/novella/novel, I won’t let that inspiration go to waste!
So, Kate and I are both taking a week off in June to focus on our book baby. Yes, you read that correctly! We are in fact writing this book together. It started off as my novel, but as I talked to her about it, she gave some absolutely stellar ideas, and the more we talked, the more she got involved. Now, we are writing it together.
As I mentioned before, I want to at least double my current word count (ambitious, I know!) and that would equate to me writing at least just over 7,000 words in 7 days. I could do 5,500 words a day and do it just fine, but the first two days I want to use for planning and brainstorming, making notes and outlining, and then for the next 7 days, write 7,000 words a day. I type around 80 words per minute when going flat out, which would equate to 90 minutes of solid writing will get me to 7000 words a day. Even if I took regular breaks, this should allow me to hit my goal.
So, in my mind, this is totally doable.
And I am very excited! At the time I post this, there will only be about a week remaining till the big week! And they way I see it, it will not only be nice to just be writing again, but it will give me a nice break from my day job of coding. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy coding, but when I get super busy at work, and I lose myself in JavaScript and CSS files, I dream in code. Seriously, I dream of CSS stylesheets and HTML documents, or at the very least they feature heavily. It’s actually not that enjoyable!
But back to writing: I have the hope of finishing at least the first book in this series during Writing Week. Seeing as how I have planned (either on paper or in my head) at least 4-5 books in this series, I really need to get cracking, and this Writing Week will certainly help me achieve this goal.
I will be posting regularly during Writing Week, so keep your eyes peeled!
See you in Writing Week! 😀
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