Saturday, July 31, 2010

Fall Dare - The Rallying Cry is Momentum!

So here it is: I'm going to try to set my goals week by week for this semster. I hope that each Saturday I can assess the coming Sun-Sat week and adjust the daily goal for that span.

The key this fall is going to be Nulla Dies Sine Linea - never a day without a line. That was the idea of this blog to start with and I think I want to return to that, even if some weeks I have to set the goal at 25 words a day.

But it's not going to be able to stay that low, because I have a heck of a lot to do. First of all, I want to have two more books up on Amazon by Christmas. (Christmas and the week after tends to be record sales days for Kindle eBooks.) These are sequels to existing books, and they have readers waiting.

One of those books, Test of Freedom, is all there. It just needs a @%$#& rewrite. It keeps hiding behind newer and shinier ideas, though. The other book, A Fistful of Divas is, um, an unfinished short story I want to turn into a novel. Which means you could say I have barely started it.

Plus the current W.I.P. (The Man Who Did Too Much) is clamoring to be finished. And The Untitled Serial Which Isn't Really A Serial is also clamoring for some quality time.

I'm not going to get all that done on 25 words a day. Or even 300 words a day (which is what I'm setting for this week). But by setting those goals when I can't do more, I can accomplish one thing - not stopping.

And that's it: Between tonight and Saturday the seventh, I will write at least 300 words a day, which should be nearly 2500 by the time I'm done. Depending on how this week goes at the Day Job, I may be able to speed up the week after. We'll see.

2 comments:

Mary said...

I hate revisions because it's so very hard to set a goal. Some pages need a lot, some pages need very little, so if it's either pages or words (even antiwords, so you get credit for squeezing words out of the manuscript as well as onto it) -- there will be a lot of variation in work.

The Daring Novelist said...

You said it!

That's the biggest problem I have for using this blog as an ongoing novel dare. How the heck do you measure revision and outlining?