This is some advice I read and heard frequently, but seemed a bit obvious and I didn’t pay that much attention to it to begin with: The most important thing to do, if you want to be a writer, is write.
It’s a pretty obvious piece of advice, right? If you want to do a thing, you need to do the thing. I found that for me, at least, it was a bit of advice that I actually found really difficult to internalise and act on. You need to actually write on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing, you just need to actually do it. If you’re stuck on a scene in your manuscript, just write a short story or random scene or literally anything else. It doesn’t matter, as long as you get into the habit of writing on a regular (daily/weekly) basis. Often, the hardest part of this is actually sitting down and opening up Microsoft Word.
For me, I found that setting a daily word count goal was my best bet. I set a goal of 500 words per day, every single day. If I had something on and knew I wouldn’t be able to get the time to write, I made the effort to write more in preceding days, so at the end of the week I still hit my quota. This is how I wrote my unpublished first novella, it’s how I wrote Prometheus’ Daughter and it’s how I wrote The Flame’s Burden.
I’ve already said that I’m intending on starting on my manuscript for my next book tomorrow. I’m planning on re-starting up my 500 words a day goal. What this means for me is that I have a firm goal for when the first draft will be done. If I write 500 words a day, and the novella is planned to be 45,000 to 50,000 words long, that means it should take me no more than 100 days. Counting that out, my first draft should be complete on 5 September 2016.
With the predicted date of completion of the first draft being at the start of September, I am almost certain I won’t get it published by the end of the year. That’s a little disappointing, to be honest — my initial plan was to put out a book per year while I was working full-time. My own fault for spending four months doing very little writing. At least now I have a goal in mind and a plan for when it’ll get done.
I might still try for it. If I can get the draft done early and be disciplined about my editing work, and my editor isn’t especially busy, and I can get my artist started on the cover early… That’s a lot of ifs, so it’s definitely not my realistic goal at the moment. It’s a little bit of an extra motivator in the back of my mind, though.
Either way, I’ll report in tomorrow with my progress.
