Woke up at a quarter to six after not quite enough sleep. Which happens when I turn the lights out at ten instead of nine.I did meditate, though, and actually wrote a few words before breakfast. Yeah!
Then breakfast with the boy coming down later than usual because he had first and last period off and shorter periods for the rest because of the heat.
A little more writing after my breakfast before my husband showed up. Then some knitting and a lot of talking about P.A.F humbuckers. (Those are legendary guitar pickups. PAF stands for „patent applied for“ and are a special kind made by Gibson around 1959, they are responsible for a certain sound that is highly desirable. It is possible to buy replicas which are better or worse and if you’re interested in maybe getting some you can spend months on research. Also, my husband has a book about them which he is reading for the second or third time at the moment.)
The boy came home from school just as I was getting ready to go grocery shopping and offered to accompany me. So we went out in the scorching heat, walked for twenty minutes while talking all the time, got groceries including cake and sweets as one does and walked back. Phew.
Then I made apricot compote from our own apricots. First time ever because I just bought the tree last year:
We had pancakes for lunch, my husband and I with spinach and the boy with apricot compote. The rest will become ice cream later today. But first some more fried zucchini blossoms:
And pancakes:
Then dishes and then I sat down to find out how many words of fiction I had written over the last year or so. The tally is:
- November and December 2017: 63,611
- All of 2018: 200,562
- First half of 2019: 87,209
Not too shabby. That was the first draft of a paranormal mystery novel, then the switch to the new, slower writing method which gave me a 95,000 word novel, a 97,000 word novel, a 13,000 word short story and about 50,000 words of the novel-in-progress. Those last three and the story all belong together and are kind of urban fantasy.
First of all this tally makes me feel a little better because it’s not as bad as I thought it was. I am a little behind this year compared to last year but the year isn’t over yet and there was all that renovation and two trips in there.
The reason I had wanted those numbers was because Dean Wesley Smith had talked about „Pulp Speed“ on his blog and answered a few questions in a follow-up post. I would love it if I could come near writing that much but that would certainly mean spending more time at actually doing it.
My real numbers for 2018 come down to about 500 words per day on average. Which usually takes me less than half an hour. But the really interesting thing is that the first thirty minutes of every day I only ever get about 200 to 400 words done because I also spend that time going back over what I wrote the day before. The next thirty usually give me something between 500 and 700 words. Which means if I write for an hour per day I get at least 700 words but more often something around 1,500. The same time on two different days, though will only give me 400 to 1,000 words.
It’s not so much about spending consecutive time, though that does make a difference as well, but it seems that all the sleeping and such in between takes me away from the story and I need time to get back in later.
I also have to say that throughout the whole time period I wrote daily blog posts here, posts that are usually around 500 words and a monthly newsletter. Dean Wesley Smith would count those as well but I didn’t so I don’t know how much that was.
Now that I have that data I really want to write more than 20,000 again until the end of the year. Of course.
After that revelation I plonked down in front of TV, watched the tour and spun for half an hour, taught two singing students, started writing this post, got really hungry, had something to eat, did my knee exercises and tried writing a few more words. With my goal for Camp NaNo cut in half I still have to write 2,200 words a day until the end of the month to ‚win‘.
I promised myself that I could watch some more of the „Digital Art for Beginners’-workshop if I made it. Well, I ended up not getting to watch that. Pity.
Today there will be the last day of school, cleaning, the boy will get his report card, there will be teaching, and making stuffed wine leaves for lunch and homemade apricot ice cream and then it will be summer break.
Ah.
Also it should get a little cooler starting tomorrow.
Exhale.
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