So over the last couple of months I have been making some serious changes to my writing process.  Whilst the old process certainly worked (it turned out a decent novel, didn’t it?) I realised that it wasn’t very efficient for what I want to achieve in the next couple of years.  I was behind already because of leg-geddon and it appeared my old process wasn’t very resilient when things came along that threw spanners in the works.
When you are writing for yourself then taking years to craft a novel is acceptable.  You can tinker and work at your own pace.  When you want to be commercial as an author, taking years to produce a novel is not.   I want to get to the stage where I can write two novels a year whilst still dealing with all the distractions life throws at you, and still maintaining some sort of life outside of writing.  It’s a tall order, I know, and one that requires me to be a lot more organised.

I’ve done a LOT of work behind the scenes.  I’ve taken the time to understand exactly ‘how’ I write and then make some massive changes in the way I tackle a novel.  It’s meant that my daily wordcount has risen.  I can do over 3000 words comfortably now, in fact I’ve had at least two writing days in the last week where I’ve done over 3500 words.  And good words as well, not stuff I’ll look back on and want to totally rewrite (it’ll still need editing, it always does).
At the same time, I’ve done a lot of work to organise my distractions.  I’ve ‘lifehacked’ to make myself more efficient and ensure that real life doesn’t get in the way of writing.  It’s meant that I can have a day where I go and find nearly 50 caches and then write over three thousand words in the evening (my idea of perfection!).  It seems to be working as I had scheduled Monday to be a day to tackle some of the massive list of things to do that had amassed whilst I’d been away in Birmingham and I had most of the entire week’s list done by lunchtime.
This is all good, but one problem remains.  I’ve never been a great one for consistency when it comes to daily wordcount.  I can write two thousand words one day and then go three days without writing anything.  The new process makes it hard to combat this habit as it involves coming out of the writing with each new chapter to come up with a writing plan and the stop-start nature of the writing means that I am losing days to little more than procrastination.
Seeing as I find it very difficult to even do some consecutive days geocaching challenges, I think it’s a problem that extends outside of just writing.  It’s the final challenge to solve, to find a way to naturally write every day.  I suspect it’s just a tweak of my existing system that’s needed but if anyone has any ideas or wants to let everyone know how they maintain daily consistency in the comments below, I’m all ears!
If I can do that then I’m really laughing and all this hard work will have been worth it.