Combo counter update – It’s going well, it’s going not so well

January 21, 2014

For those of you who recall my Don’t break the chain post, here’s an update:

Combo counter: Editing chain, 10 days. Writing chain, 0 days.

So in some ways it’s going well, and some ways not so much. On the one hand I’ve been keeping up with the editing, and it’s helping me make some serious progress through this draft. On the other, I’ve been completely falling down on writing new content, and my failing has gotten so consistent that missing another day doesn’t bother me that much anymore. Which is bad since that’s counter to the whole point.

In addition, I have one other concern – I’m not editing quickly enough. Editing is in some ways more difficult and tiring than writing, but right now it’s the most important thing I need to focus on because I want to present this book to you. But at the pace I’m going it will be intolerably long before it even gets to the rest of my proofreaders and a copy-editor, and I don’t like that.

So I’m making a few changes.

First of all, I’m increasing my editing goal to 2,000 words a day. This alone might be too much for me, what with my full-time job and the occasional social life, but 1,000 just isn’t enough. Besides, even if I end up missing the mark once or twice, I think failing at a bigger goal will bring me closer to my true goal than taking it easy would. It’s worked before.

Next, I’m going to keep my writing goal at 1,000 words a day. However, I’m going to add RandomC posts into that total. Blogging for Random Curiosity simply takes too long, and while I absolutely love doing it, I have no prayer in hell of generating any other content after writing one. No big deal though, because blogging for RC is generating new content for publication, it just doesn’t happen to be fiction. Close enough.

So that’s my new plan. One caveat: If generating new content still proves to be too much with everything else I’m doing, I’ll drop that in favor of concentrating on editing. If that happens, I’ll edit this post accordingly. I’ll try not to though, because I want to have more stuff on the way when the first book comes out. Being selfish is a lot of work, apparently.

Wish me luck.

Edit: I’ve tried it some more, and a pattern has emerged – switching from one story to another in a single day doesn’t work. Who would have thought, eh? But when one story only needs editing and the other only needs writing, for me to do both in a single day I have to work on both stories.

Since that wasn’t working well, I’m switching to the following for my goal: Either write 1K words (goal: 2K) or edit 2K words (goal: 3K). If I hit either one, I get my writing check mark for the day. That’ll keep it nice and simple, and the more I hew to my goals rather than my minimums, the faster this book will be done. Huzzah!