New Story Starts Today!
The last time I wrote a novel was back in early 2019. At the time I was in the middle of launching my debut novel while simultaneously trying to finish the third novel in that pre-planned 6-book series. Suffice it to say, it was not my finest hour. Fast-forward to today, and I've learned so much since then about myself. I've had many growing pains along the way and I think I'm far better equipped to tackle what comes with writing a novel. I've done it before. I can do it again. Only this time, as I've been repeating to myself and anyone who will listen, time and time again, I'm going to move at a much slower pace.
It started with the research phase. The old Erica would've skipped this or BS'd her way through it in order to get to the writing part. But, as I said, I learned a lot from my brief hiatus from writing novels. And the first thing I learned is "if you don't know it, don't fake it!" Readers will know you're faking it. Even if you're writing fantasy. Doesn't matter. I'm not a pirate. Never have been and it's very likely that I never will be. That doesn't mean I can just have my pirates just "do whatever" in the book. There are certain rules and expectations a reader already has in their minds about the speech pattern and behavior of pirates and if yours doesn't come close to that, then you're dead in the water (pardon the pun). So, I learned and I promised myself, that whatever I wrote next would come from a place of knowledge and deep-diving research. That's exactly what I did, for about two months.
Now that I feel I know my characters and I know the story I wish to tell better than I have any other novel I've written in the past, up until this point, the time has come to hit the ground running.
The chapter writing begins today!
I still can't believe it myself. I honestly never thought I'd ever return to writing novels. I had resigned myself, back in 2019 when I had my total mental meltdown, that I would be happy and satisfied writing short stories. And I was, for a time. But the urge and the desire to write something longer and spend more time with characters than a few thousand words never left the corners of my mind.
My patrons already know the deal on how this will go down, but I want to let you in on it as well:
5 days a week (Mondays - Wednesdays, Fridays & Saturdays) I will be streaming on Twitch & YouTube (whichever is your site of choice, I recommend you stop on by) while I'm writing.
Each stream will be 3 hours long and consist of 3 timed writing sprints.
Each writing sprint will be 45min long followed by a 15min break to either chat with whoever has joined me or take a break, stretch my legs, get some sustenance, etc.
At the end of each sprint, I will log my word count into a spreadsheet I've created that will also calculate my daily word count in total for all 3 sprints.
My goal is to write 1k words per sprint, which works out to be 3k words per stream. That is also the base length I'm hoping to have per chapter. So, one chapter per streaming day?
At the end of each week, I will have written somewhere between 12k - 15k words.
This task of writing River Run should take approximately 7 weeks, if all goes according to plan, which, if 2020 is any indication, will likely not happen.
As I complete a vomit draft chapter, it will be copy/pasted into the DRAFTS area that is For Patrons only. As a patron you will get access not only to all the research I have done so far but each chapter as I write it, unedited. The cost starts at just $3 a month but whatever you pay the rewards are the same: Everything I write immediately after I write it. This includes completed novels in EPub form to read on an e-reader.
Seems simple enough but I'm still nervous as hell to get back in the trenches! Now, here are just a few screenshots of the spreadsheet I created. This is, by no means a suggestion to do what I'm doing to this level of detail to track your own words, but I highly recommend doing something similar. It's always a good rule of thumb to try and have all chapters be of similar word count length. Whether that is as much as 5k words each chapter or as little as 2k words. The reader can tell when a chapter is dragging on compared to the others and can lead to boredom or worse, frustration.
If you're interested in seeing my progress without stopping by my stream or if you just want to download a copy of my spreadsheet to use yourself, feel free to just click HERE. I recommend tweaking it to your needs or just using it as-is. Keeping in mind I've put "0" on days when I know I don't stream or I know I have a pre-planned engagement that will cause me to miss a writing day.
Looking at all of this, and being the number cruncher that I am, I just wanted to end with these key bits of information:
34 Stream Days
102 [45min] writing sprints
1,530 minutes of actual writing time
25.5 hours
~1,000 words per sprint
~3,000 words per stream day
~12k - ~15k words per stream week
~102k - 108k vomit draft words
Can it be done? Only time will tell. Wish me luck and let me know in the comments below if you'll be joining either to cheer me on or do some of your own novel-writing work alongside me.