This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
128k words on my NaNoWriMo project. I'm only two half-chapters (~3.5k-4.5k words total) away from a complete first draft. All going smoothly I'll be finished by Friday morning, a full seven months (!) after I started the first draft. If I do manage to accomplish that goal in time, I won't mention my progress in these threads for six weeks, at which point I'll start working on the second draft.
Edit: first draft in the can, 134k words. Not looking at it for six weeks.
Not much to say except, well done and good luck with the next steps
To add: what’s your ”working well” process been like? I’ve never attempted a novel because I haven’t trusted myself to stay in my lane for long enough, so my go-to’s have been essays and poems. Basically the finishing line has to be in view for me to make progress. I understand I need to change this psychology to produce a meaningful body of work.
Thank you.
As mentioned, this project started off as a NaNoWriMo project, for which I had to write 50,000 words in the month of November (i.e. averaging 1,666 words a day). Some days the words came easily, other days felt like pulling teeth.
The trick, I think, is to break a large task down into a bunch of smaller ones. Setting yourself a daily target of X many words is an obvious one: during November I aimed for 1,666, ever since then I aim for 1,000 on weekdays and 2,000 on weekends.
Additionally, I have a spreadsheet I use for tracking my progress. At the outset I mapped out a basic plot structure, including a chapter list. When I reach the end of a chapter, I open the spreadsheet, mark that chapter as complete and enter its word count in the corresponding cell. The spreadsheet then calculates the average word count of the finished chapters, the number of incomplete chapters and multiplies them out to produce an estimate of how many words I have left to write. Being able to say I only have X many chapters totalling Y many words left to write is a helpful way to motivate myself, as opposed to a vague "it's finished when it feels like it's finished". Of course it's not perfect, because as I write, ideas for new chapters occur to me and I have to update the spreadsheet accordingly (my first pass at the chapter list was only 28 chapters, which eventually ballooned into 41: admittedly, some of that was because of me coming up with new ideas, whereas in other cases I just decided to split an extremely long chapter in two), but still helpful.
This is, needless to say, a new working method for me: when writing my previous novels (of which we do not speak, because they were unreadable trash) I didn't use a spreadsheet, and got no more sophisticated than using a project management tool to ensure that I was meeting my daily word target. But I think this method works better.
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