Weekly Writing Intentions: Saturday, November 4, 2023
Daily Diary, Day 1160:
I was able to maintain my exercise at just under 2 hours average a day, walked at least once every day, and did my core exercises five of the days. My intention is to maintain at least 90 minutes, next week, recognizing that between a new set of tests, a relative in town that we hope to visit, and the end of daylight savings time, which is going to require some rearranging of when I do my walk, that the 2 hours might not be attainable.
Writing also went better this week. The first four days I averaged 546 words a day, then National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) started on Wednesday. The first day of NaNoWriMo I only got 434 words written, but then I hit a point in the novel where I was dealing with material I had included in the draft of the last book, Tides of Acerba.
If you were following my posts then, you might remember that my first draft of that book was getting way too long, and I knew that I had to break the story up into 2 parts. This also meant cutting out a couple of themes. So, what I did the past two days is take those bits and pieces I had cut and pasted them into the draft I am working on now. They were very rough, and of course needed a fair degree of editing to deal with the fact that the events I had described were happening months later in the time line. However, this meant that while I did write a new scene to act as a transition, most of what I was doing was rewriting, which goes more swiftly.
So, I probably got about 500 brand new words written the last 3 days of the week, but with the previously written material added in, for the entire week, I actually got ended up averaging 1500 words a day!!
I don’t expect to keep that average, but I hope to maintain at least a 1000 words a day average next week. The manuscript is at 33,455 words, the goal is to get at least 25,000 words this month, and maintaining 1000 most days should get me there.
However, to hit this goal but continue to keep my health my first priority, I am committed to keeping my daily posts short. So off I go to start writing!
In case you aren’t sure how you got here, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. This is my newsletter reflecting on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. If you aren’t already subscribed but are interested in doing so, you can subscribe by clicking the little button below. If you enjoyed this post, please do click on the little heart and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments!