Just in Time July - 500 words per day writing/edit - all genres welcome

A pretty good month for me, being part of this thread really helped. I exceeded my targets, which considering I am editing, not writing, I'm quite pleased with.

In total, I edited 168 pages, cutting my word count down by nearly 19k words (and there's more to come!).

I kept a daily log to try and keep myself on track (which definitely helped):



This month I am aiming to reach the end of this edit, hopefully removing another 10k words in the process. Once I've done that, I think I'll read a couple of thrillers and then go again!

Salutations everyone, I can't believe it's already July.

SAOIRSE - Wishing you the best for July
BK - Congrats on hitting success, your spreadsheet is awesome

I was aiming for 5k words in June and cleared it a few hundred. Didn't think I was going to, so it was a pleasant surprise. For July, I think I'll aim for another 5k.

Thanks Zan! Well done on hitting your numbers and good luck for this month.

With half the year gone, I really needed something to push me on with my editing and I found the spreadsheet quite useful with keeping my momentum going. Being an IT nerd it was also satisfying to watch the progress on the charts day-by-day I work for a software company that specialises in analytics, so it isn't particularly complicated by work standards.

If anyone thinks it might help, I doubt it would take me long to put together one for writing rather than editing? Happy to send it to anyone/everyone who thinks it might be useful. All you would need is a recent copy of Excel.

Hey everyone,

I was away for the last week of June so I finished on that 15k mark I reported before I went away. This month's target is to equal or better that total.

Best of luck to everyone with their writing this month!

Thanks to the QLH squirrels I finally have a query letter. Now I need a synopsis. I had Scrivener auto-generate one for me, and it's 24 pages long.

I'm also doing agent research, whee! This is not the fun part, not at all.

Would love to get the synopsis done and start work on Series Book 4 again. I probably have to tile in being utterly demoralized by Rs, though.

Go, team!

Hey liz! Great to see you back on this thread, and glad that the query hell is temporarily abated, if only for synopsis hell.

I did a couple of thousand words last week, so I need to step up the pace this week if I want to hit my target. Fingers crossed.

It's good to see all of you! I'm sorry I've been away so long. Family stuff has been awful, and this book is fraught for a number of reasons. I'm researching agents, and all I can see is how they're representing real writers and they'll find me ridiculous. Still, not much to do but press on.

Today I pared my 16-page synopsis down to 9! I'm trying to put together a 4-page version and a 2-page version, so I've still got quite a bit of work to do.

Did not get more work done on the synopsis, but I did do a little more agent research. And I almost started querying, but a few on my list are very fast responders, and I didn't want to start collecting Rs until I had the synopsis done.

Saoirse said:

BlackKnight - I'd love to have something like that for writing. I'm not in IT, but since I went freelance I've had to use Google Sheets for everything and I've found them to be a lifesaver since I can't remember crap. So I'm basically a spreadsheet convert.

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Hope the physical therapy has been helping. I'll put a spreadsheet together for you to try for August. Other than word/page count, if there anything in particular you'd like to monitor/record?

Good to see everyone is making progress in some form or fashion. It's like a shot in the arm saying that I can this too

Life events have slowed down my writing these last couple of weeks, hopefully as things return to normal I'll be able to increase my productivity again. I'm starting to wonder if the main character in my story needs an overhaul.... I think so (and I feel the gears in the back of my head begin to turn in thought). Think I may switch over to a different work in the meantime while I ponder it.

Sending productivity vibes to all.

My synopsis is down to juuuuuust over 4 pages. Of course, I'm no longer sure it actually makes sense. I'm fence-sitting about SYW-ing it, but if I'm going to query with the damn thing maybe I should.

I managed a little over 4,000 words this week, so I'm just about back on target, but I can't help but feel I wanted a little more. Also, I am 44k into this draft and I'm about a quarter of the way through my outline. I'm going to have to take this book to Cutsville, USA when I'm eventually done, I think...

Good to hear everyone is making progress!

onesecondglance said:

I managed a little over 4,000 words this week, so I'm just about back on target, but I can't help but feel I wanted a little more. Also, I am 44k into this draft and I'm about a quarter of the way through my outline. I'm going to have to take this book to Cutsville, USA when I'm eventually done, I think...

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I've been there a while and it doesn't look like I'll be leaving any time soon - first draft came out at 425k. Currently down to 367k and still wielding the edit-sword...

Only 86 words on the novel today, but about 2.5k of ramble about the plot to my university supervisor. Basically, my outline for this character runs out after the chapter I'm currently writing, and everything kinda drops into a black hole after that. This is not a good thing for an outliner. Still, I know what happens in the other POV character's story, so I've got at least a few days before I have to jump into that hole... hopefully by then I'll have come up with something. (A flashlight, perhaps, or a ladder.)

Hope everyone else is doing okay?

I am at an odd point where I just finished one book, trying to get cover design, marketing ready, editing, etc.
I have 2 other books active on the desk right now, and a 3rd that I will go back to when the others are done (I finally figured out how to continue that 3rd book.)

So I am very busy, but not as much of it is writing as I would like.
I don't use word-count goals. I feel they are artificial and push quantity over quality.
I write by the scene.
I avoid target goals on books until they are actually written...then I start setting target dates and goals (for the editing, and release date).
Over the years I found that setting a due date on the writing created some strange psychological baggage that actually made me NOT wanna write that book anymore...like I was trapped in a bad marriage or something.



$0.02

My synopsis is down to 3-1/2 pages!

And I'm thinking of deploying it to SYW to make sure it's coherent, but Spouse is kind of wondering if I'm using that as an excuse to (further) delay climbing on the query carousel. He may be right. But I do need to make sure it's coherent.

Go, team!

I have sent two queries. (Neither required the synopsis.)

One will be a NR, the other will be a 4-6 week R. I have decided to become pre-depressed.

Might do some work on Other Book, though. Been a while since I've been able to write actual words.

Hey everyone, been a bit since I last posted but I see everyone is moving right along

Ralph, interesting take on writing by the scene instead of word count. Do you try for so many scenes in a week or something different?

Liz, best of luck with your queries.

Life stuff continues to slow down my own input. I've only written about 1.5k words this month so far.

Zan75!

Sent out 2 more queries today. Might let it sit at 4 for a while. I do have to get on that synopsis - there are a number of agents I'd like to query that ask for the synopsis up front.

No real words, though. Life stuff for me, too.

Just completed the second edit of my WIP Bring on the 3rd! I have some rewrites to do and I need to remove some scenes and cut down some others. Hoping that this one will be a bit shorter! (I edited out 55k words in the second edit and it's still way too long)

Saoirse said:

BlackKnight - Thank you. I'm wondering if tracking the time of day I write might be useful.
.

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I've started putting something together and I'll let you know once it's ready for you to look at. Do you want to record your writing time specifically (i.e. start time) or more generally (morning, afternoon, evening, the small hours etc)?