Friday, July 1, 2011

Update: Writing!

Today marks one month since I started on Novel #2, and it is my 30th consecutive day of writing.
 
Of course, when I say "writing" that can mean anything from sitting at my computer working steadily for two hours to grabbing a quick five minutes at the end of a long busy day.  I've just been determined to write EVERY DAY, even if it's just for a few minutes. 
 
The good news is that it seems to be going good so far, I am really enjoying reconnecting with my characters and my plot every single day.  I feel like every day that I went without working on Novel #1 made me slip farther and farther away from it, and I really don't want that to happen again.
 
The bad news is that, after one month, I have written exactly eleven pages.  That's kind of not good.
 
I want to be nice to myself and not get all stressy, but I also want to get somewhere.  At 11 pages a month, it'll literally take years to get finished.  I know some writers spend years working on one novel, but I would really, really, really prefer not to be one of those writers.
 
Having a very specific goal during NaNoWriMo worked great for me, it kicked my lazy butt just like it was supposed to.  I've heard that a lot of writers have daily goals, and they write a certain number of pages or words per day.  There's just no way that's going to work for me, because of my weird work schedule I may have a ton of writing time one day and then practically none for the next few days.  I'm going to try having a weekly goal, so that if I go a few days writing very little I can theoretically make up for lost time on the days when I have more.
 
According to my internet research, a Young Adult novel can range anywhere from 50,000 words to over 150,000.  How helpful.  It looks like average might be more like 75,000, probably less, so I'm going with that.  If an average page has 250 words, that comes out to a 300 page novel. 
 
If I want to write the novel in, say, six months (which still seems like a long time, but I am trying to take it easy on myself) that would mean writing approx. 50 pages/12500 words a month, which would be 12.5 pages/3125 words per week.
 
Yikes.  Well, I really do want to pick up the pace, so that'll be my goal.  I don't even have any real idea how long this novel needs to be.  I suppose there is a chance it might not even turn out to be a YA novel, who knows.
 
And speaking of my dear little Novel #2, I have no idea if I should share much about it here or not. I love my main character so much, she's so interesting.  To me, anyway.  Is it appropriate?  Is anyone interested?