The dog wouldn’t let me go back to sleep yesterday after the poet went off to work. That’s okay, though, right? It means I get to do everything a bit earlier…Or does it?
I started with my dirty cuppa but was already about 15 minutes late to my morning pages, which are, by the way, helping me to thrash out new and renewed methods of work. Instead of going into my reading half hour (it’s half hour now, with the morning pages now added), though, I went into the house & garden half hour.
I emptied the dishwasher. I did the dog poo patrol. I fed the birds. I put a washload through. And I hung another washload out, actually out on the washing line – yay! First time this year. I had my reading half hour then, I took the dog for a walk, and I collected the poet’s regular prescription from the doctor’s surgery.
By the time I’d done all of that, I’d caught up again. But instead of going into a WMG workshop, I did yesterday’s blog post. I shared the day before’s blog post everywhere (don’t know why I didn’t do that on Tuesday), and I shared yesterday’s blog post everywhere.
I did some sums regarding how many words I can realistically produce each day, each week and each month. The morning pages are up to 15 minutes a day now, rather then the original 10. Like my pal Devon, I find the 15 minutes allows me more time to properly think things through. But I’m averaging just over 400 words per session, which is a lot faster than I thought it would be.
Now, if I can manage 400 words in 15 minutes, that’s 1,600 words in an hour. That’s a short story. Or half a short story. If I use the morning pages to brainstorm short stories, I should be able to sit down and rattle off a single short story in an hour, by hand, or a longer story across 2 hours. I already know I can type around 2,000 words an hour. Now I know I can hand-write around 1,600 words an hour.
Back in the days when I used to be prolific, I could write a short story a week. I could also write an article or feature a week. And I could write a few chapters a week. Then I started to rotate each of the tasks, so on a Monday I’d outline a short story, write draft 1 of something else, write draft 2 of something else, type a draft of something else, and proofread something else.
I neither need or want that kind of output now, but I would be happy with a short story a week. If I allocate an hour a day to be a Short Story Hour, I could outline a 1,600-word story on a Monday, write 1,600 words for draft 1 on a Tuesday, rewrite 1,600 words for draft 2 on a Wednesday, type up 1,600 words on a Thursday, and proofread 1,600 words on a Friday.
And then I’d put it to cool.
Books and novel(la)s I still prefer to create into Scrivener, and if I allocate 2 hours per day to one of those, I know I’d have 20,000 words of something by the end of a week, or up to 80,000 words of something by the end of a month. I used to ghostwrite 10,000 words per week, but that was harder as those weren’t my projects, my specialisms, my passions. However, even 10,000 words per week would be a 40,000-word novella or how-to book by the end of a month.
So I should be able to churn out 4 short stories and a novella or how-to book per month. Or I could alternate a novel with a novella and a writers’ guide.
At the moment, that 2-hour slot in the afternoon is dedicated to client work. When I don’t have client work in, I should be writing a writers’ guide or a novella. And if I have a firm outline for the next full-length Marcie Craig or Rainbow Chronicles, I could even get the first draft of one of those down in a month.
I want to clear all of my client work before we move house, which could be in 9 weeks, as we finally received notice to vacate on Tuesday. It wasn’t a surprise to either of us, as I’d been suspecting it might happen since at least last summer. And we do think they may be flexible if they know we have somewhere to go but just have to finish some work before we move in, like fit a new kitchen.
But if I can clear all of my client work before then, once the office is up and running, or even if I just have somewhere to plonk a laptop or sit with a notepad and pen, I want a Short Story Hour in the mornings and a Double Book Hour in the afternoons. (That’s a double hour, not 2 books!)
I can watch writing workshops during my dinner hour, and I’d still have an hour in the afternoon for short non-fiction work, like the dates work. Although the dates work is leading towards an entire book on ideas for writing. (Double whammy – short non-fiction and a full-length writers’ guide in one hour a day.)
And that bring me on to a release schedule and a promotion calendar.
Once we move house, I want to spend the first few months bringing existing novellas up to scratch. Some of them are too short at 15,000 words, but if they make a better 15,000-word novelette than they would a 40,000 novella, then so be it. There are still paying markets for ‘short stories’ that run to 15,000 or 20,000 words.
I’ve already said I’ll be bringing the newsletter and the bookazine back to life in January at the latest. So that can easily tie-in with the new publishing schedule which, in turn, will dictate the marketing schedule. And that, said she hopefully, should give me ample time to mug up on marketing and promotion. I already found a content calendar spreadsheet I think might work for social media. But I’ll also be looking at websites for each of the series so that those become my business-of-writing series-specific websites and this one can remain my personal day to day blog.
I’ll need a new novel to serialise in the January bookazine too, which gives me another deadline to hit. Hopefully it will be The Beast Within, Marcie Craig’s second full-length story. The year after might be Hattie’s Hotshots, which is the first of the Rainbow Chronicles prequels. Once I have 3 novels in each series, I’ll look at rapid releasing those too. They don’t have to appear in the bookazine before they’ve been published. Night Crawler didn’t. In fact, it might be better the other way around anyway.
And yes, I thrashed out all of that in my morning pages, just not in such detail. Writing it all down is so helpful, I may just print today’s post off and put it somewhere I can see it.
With all of that done, I had my midday breakfast (brunch) and started today’s blog post.
I caught up on 2 weeks of the plotting with depth workshop and then wrote the premium 40 writing prompts article for Patreon and Medium. That last job took the rest of the day. I finalised today’s blog post, scheduled it where I could, and called it a day.
Today I have week 4 of the plotting with depth workshop and the editing job to do. I may also start this month’s premium Take 1 Idea…article for Patreon and Medium.
This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.
