25 Days Later . . .

Twenty-five days ago I wrote a post about a novel-length project I was undertaking and how I was planning to stick to a new writing strategy, detailed in a post before that. This post focused on writing quotas and the optimum time of the day during which one should write, in order to generate the most creativity. The image from the first post is below, showing how many words I had written of the novel thus far (in about 3 weeks.)

Before . . .

I gave myself -as you can see from the image- 25 days to complete a first draft, which I estimated to be at 70,000 words in length (sadly I overestimated this, but plan on fleshing out areas that I feel require such treatment) by writing 2200 words each and every day, as well as reading for at least one hour every day, a hobby that I am sustaining in the quite limited time that I have. Below is a new image that shows my progress.

After!

 I reached the ending -which I had already written- two nights ago, improving some areas and adding some scenes that provided a connection to the rest of the novel, given that when I had written the ending I had began right in the middle of the action, to keep myself interested and then wrote a plan around that before writing forward. I've found this a very useful strategy because when I wrote my first novel (currently in second-drafting stage) I hit walls constantly, and usually found myself subject to Writer's Block. in the entire course of this novel, I'm glad to report that only ONCE did I find myself staring at a blank screen unable to write anything in an evening. To give some context to the great progress this is for me, the post that I wrote announcing the completion of my first novel was entitled "700 Days Later . . ." which just highlights how slow I was, writing from August 2011 to July 2013, when the post was published. I'm also glad to say that as far as writing quality is concerned and plotting, this was a much better first-time effort! Time to improve!

PS. I'm also working on planning long-length ideas so that I don't end up forgetting them as soon as I go to sleep. Some are SF works whereas others are more mainstream (like this one.) I'll update on my work more in the future but until then, thanks for reading!