Momentum – The Climb #846

Thursday 17^th June 2021

Today was a bad writing day. I still managed to get some 2000+ words done but I’m trying to work out if my productivity is because I didn’t have a plan for my work or whether there’s some momentum that days like Warcraft Wednesday ruin.

I’m now up to around 70,000 words. I suppose that’s pretty good, but I know that last week the mid-week dip caused me to have a lot less over the week than I thought.

On one hand, progress is progress. But there’s a part of this that needs to get done. I’ll admit I feel like 40% of it is external pressure I feel (but probably isn’t there). 60% is me needing to get this done for myself.

Yesterday introduced a new character but I didn’t have a plan for the chapter so I was (shock! Horror!) making up on the fly. That can be fun and this book definitely has a more discovery lean to it than others I’ve written, but making things up as I go along usually causes a mess, as I’ll have a good idea and then need to roll back.

I’m already fighting the urge to go back and edit. There’s a lot of emphasis on smell put on this imagined world, and I’ve largely been ignoring it for the last 50,000 words. It’s something I’ve told myself I can fix in the next draft.

But I ended the day wanting to scrap what I’d written today and rewrite the scenes because I’d subsequently spent a little time thinking about the direction and impact I want this to have. And as much as rewriting a scene wouldn’t ruin my daily word count, it doesn’t get me close to the end, which is my goal.

This book was originally conceived as a serial for the website. There’s a lot of scenes and they jump from character to character. I see Kindle has announced Kindle-vella for the US, something this project might once have been perfect for. I need to take this willingness to jump around and play with it.

I have a big action scene coming up, and the new character is now (after some thought) gonna drop some major lore and infodumps. So the plan is to switch between the two. It’ll keep the readers entertained while I give them a lot of information.

I have a plan now, so hopefully tomorrow will be better, but I’m still no closer to discovering whether there’s momentum to my writing or not. Let’s see how many words I get done tomorrow.