March 30th – 280,555 words.

Well, only one more day to the end of March and today, or rather this morning felt good. Since I’d finished one first draft manuscript yesterday, today was the chance to pick up and start something new. I said yesterday I was determined to write the sequel to the book prior to the last one, so I picked up a fresh blank document and just started to write. It felt like returning to some long lost good friends. It felt like I’d never left the story at all.

Where was the plan you say? Well, that was never in doubt, when I wrote the first book I’d intended to finish the tale in about 60k words, but after only a few days I’d found I was writing far more detail into it. Not letting the story get flabby, far from it, but the story just shouted out for the tiny details, the nuances of the conversations between the main characters and the slow development of the main heroine. As a result, when I found the best place to break the story I had written 78k words, and the plot I had was only half way through. All I needed to do this morning was pick up my old planning notes, fire up scrivener and copy the last half of the story into a new project. A few minutes of adjustment to the opening to bring it into line with the new ending for book one, and hey presto, a fully formed consistent, coherent and I believe interesting plot.

That I think has been the key for me, keeping it interesting. I’m interested in writing each of these stories, it hasn’t at any point become a chore, I’ve maintained that level of enthusiasm so as soon as I’m over the initial hurdle of getting back into it, I’m flying, literally. Several times this month my writing speed has peaked at over 1,600 words an hour, and today has been no exception, possibly even closer to 2,000 words an hour for the last 40 minutes as I completed the first chapter.

Word count and speed aren’t everything, in fact they come a poor second and third to quality, but you can’t edit it if you didn’t get it written in the first place, can you?

I may seem anal about the numbers but it’s just my way of target setting and keeping track of my own performance. Hell, this post is over 400 words already, and I’m not counting it.