Well, I came into February by finishing my last book (WEAR WOLF, available now!) a week early, so I took the next week off from formal book work and wrote a synopsis for something, sent that in to an editor, and did some further work on a different proposal.
Halfway through the month, as noted before, I was struck by inspiration in the middle of the night, and now have about a thousand disconnected words on that project, which I am supposed to get 10 pages to 3 chapters written of Soon, according to my writing group. Possibly I can manage that next week. We’ll see.
I wrote about 24K on the next Dublin Driver book (roughly a third), which is great because my actual goal was 16K so I’ve bought myself some time on that, which is always better than…not.
And on the buying myself some time front, boy, I gotta say, this not writing to a crushing deadline thing? This is great. Right now my daily wordcount goal is around 1500 words (which has gone down from about 1700 since I started the book), and only having to do that much makes it way, WAY less stressful than looking at a “oh god if I don’t get at least 3k done every day for the rest of my life I will never catch up” wordcount. It also means that every day I do MORE than that (and I’m averaging probably 2000ish words a day), I get to feel good about that instead of like a total failure. This is great!
The thing I’m now working toward is actually getting my act together enough to do those words more or less first thing when I get into the office (it’s AMAZING how much time i can spend screwing around) so that I can then SWITCH TO ANOTHER PROJECT in the afternoon.
Literally ANY wordcount on another project is a win, as long as I’m not behind on the main one. I just have to get into the right habit of the thing.
Which, realistically is not going to happen meaningfully in March because I’m going to America for a week and am assuming I’ll be dead on my feet for the week after that, but it’s what I’m aiming for in the bigger picture/longer run here.
So anyway, yeah, a pretty good writing month. I’ve done, hrm, IDK, in the region of…say, 90K so far this year? That’s entirely satisfactory, tbh.
And that’s the status of me on this leap day of the year. :)