Full disclosure: I’ve written this post very after-the-fact. In December, 2018. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was three months ago’ stand in my way?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

I missed a day, and broke my chain. :( I had 43 days of straight writing — the most I’ve ever managed — and I visited my mother for her birthday at the end of the month and got sick, and then got home so late from that weekend that I was just exhausted and could literally not stay up long enough to write even 300 words unless it had been “All work and no play make Gary a dull boy” 30 times. Which was tempting, but no. :) I hated to break the chain, but it was unavoidable. So, I start over in October with a fresh new chain at 1, and it’ll take me a lot longer to get to level 3. Bummer, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it.

I also hit a milestone! On the first, I realized that I’d free-written enough material to start organizing it into a bona-fide outline! So on the 1st through the 7th, I broke down my brain-dump into chunks and created a scene-by-scene rough outline of the entire novel, from start to finish. Very rough. :) On the 8th, I actually started writing the novel itself. Chapter 1, scene 1. And immediately had to start adding scenes to the outline! :)

For September, 2018, my stats are

• Words: 37,243
  • Daily average words: 1284
• Time: 2048 minutes (34 hours, 8 minutes)
  • Daily average time: 70:37 min
• Average words/hour: 1,091
• Chain: 43 days
• Level: 2 on the 16th
• Quota: 300 words/day as of the 16th