Day 9 was... ugh, wth? 2,276, literally the same thing as yesterday? How does *that* happen? Being within 3 words of a previous total was weird enough, but the same number (when that number is more than 0) is just bizarre.
I thought there had to be some kind of mistake, but no, that's actually right. I was up to 24,658 overall words today. Yesterday I was at 22,382. And the day before was 20,106.
Usually I'm not even within 30 words of a previous day, and it's pretty common to vary by hundreds of words. Of course, today was a complete mess. I had got to something like 1,658 early on, and kept thinking that I either had more done or had a lot more time. I was thinking that it was a Saturday so I could probably break 4k or 5k words, and let myself catch up a bit, but... ugh, not so much. I took a nap that ran long, and that killed a lot of my time near the end of the day. (Which is largely a reflection of my sleep cycles being off from not really sleeping last weekend.)
Beyond that, I was going to bore everybody with the details before deciding against it, but I'm leaning towards some long-term planning across all of my projects to avoid issues like I'm having right now.
Just the salient points real quickly: Back when I got back into writing last November, like countless other writers I wound up binging Brandon Sanderson's BYU lecture series (which is most likely the best free writing lecture series on the internet). I took a great many pieces of his advice to heart -- including writing every day (when possible) and limiting myself to one thing at any stage at a time (ie, only drafting one book at a time, only planning one book at a time, and only revising one book at a time).
Eventually this evolved into me planning my next project while drafting the current one (and aspiring to edit/revise a previous one at the same time). I would sometimes get ahead of myself a little by planning out more than one future project (books 4 & 6 both got planning documents when I was writing either book 1 or book 2). Unfortunately, the problem with this structure is that I wasn't always finished with the planning for the next one by the end of a manuscript's first draft. Sometimes I'd try to plan something out while working on a shorter or transitional project, but I really dislike downtime between books (and the other stuff got in the way of planning), so I've often just been starting with a rougher idea of what I wanted to do (which mostly worked out with book 7 since I finally mapped an overall story out early on into it, but I still have tons of gaps in book 8).
Instead of just choosing my next project (or two) while working on my current one, I'm thinking I need a much longer term plan across everything. This way instead of planning project-to-project, I *should* have things ready well ahead of time. (Granted, book 6 had planning that was done early yet that was a misfire, and book 5 had minimal planning at the start, so... maybe the theory is flawed, although I'll have to test it out.)
At this point, I've more or less committed to my plans for the rest of the year (the werewolf story is next, and then the Christmas thriller/horror is after it).
And yes, this is the SHORT version of it. The longer version which I quickly typed out then saved in a word doc when I realized "That's a lot of TMIs" included references to projects and a rough timeline. The only really relevant part there is that I have a cosmic horror-fantasy and a dark-fantasy in the early planning stages (and intend to sporadically build out those planning documents in coming months).
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Helix -- While I'm sure being across from a rodeo is a distraction, that also sounds awesome.
Lea -- I didn't say it earlier, but welcome to the party. And I can certainly relate to the temptation of putting off editing in favor of drafting, because I do that non-stop. Your self-control is apparently better than mine.
Karasu -- Best of luck with the procedure.
Taylor -- My day's writing also got killed by procrastination, so I know that struggle =x
Woolly -- Have fun
Cindy -- As always, I'm in awe of your ability to stick with the editing process.
TStarnes -- Even if you're not moving as quickly as you want, you're still getting a reasonable amount done.
