I haven’t been posting about my writing work days of late. Namely because, in short, I haven’t been writing. I’m not going to list a litany of excuses: I know my mind, I know what’s valid and what isn’t, and I know that some of the time has been spent prepping for actual writing.

But I also have realized that writing one day a week isn’t going to cut it. I need some kind of momentum, even if I’m not writing every day. Today, I came up with a plan of attack:

On writing work days, have butt in chair no later than after lunch. Why wait? Because often I have appointments first thing in the morning, and honestly, it’s a good time to get grocery shopping out of the way. The morning also allows me to catch up on whatever THINGS I want/need to do, things that might otherwise distract me from writing.

After lunch, write. Take whatever small snippet from Codename: Telepathic Soulmates and work on filling in the holes for revision. There is no word count for these sessions. Optimistically, I’d like to pound out a chapter. Today, I did that, reaching 1,402 for Chapter One, which is an improvement on the previous draft’s word count of 2,224. Since one of the goals for this revision (some rewrite, some just hard polishing) is to reduce the word count, I consider this a win.

Then, on Saturdays and Sundays, write. It doesn’t have to be for a whole day, nor should it be, as there’s stuff to do on weekends, yo! The goal for these days? Optimistically, a chapter completed per day.

Mondays through Thursdays are not likely going to work for writing. However, I don’t want to lose momentum. I also don’t want to edit on during writing sessions. So, Mondays through Thursdays will be dedicated to editing. Re-reading the stuff I wrote the previous weekend, looking for blind spots, comparing it to the previous draft, making sure I’m not missing anything that’s vitally important. Make notes for the next set of chapters I need to tackle, whether I’m rewriting them or just polishing the life out of them.

Then, on Friday through Sunday, write when ready.

Repeat until novel is complete, and then come up with a new schedule. 🙂

And that’s it. We’ll see how it goes. I’m cautiously optimistic, though optimism and pessimism rage constant battles in my brain and pessimism is all-too-often the victor. But I really want to give this book one more go, make sure it stands alone, and get it out the door. Carrie Vaughn used an interesting phrase in her blog post, “This Week’s State of the Desk,” wherein she states:

It’s a very interesting time in my brain right at the moment.  Those two novella-things I finished revising last week?  Turns out finishing them cleared up a big chunk of real estate in my brain.  Those two projects have been living in my brain for years, and now that they’re done, I can clean under the creative sofas, so to speak, vacuum up the dust that accumulated around them, and see what the place looks like.

A bunch of new projects flooded into the space, which I’m excited about, because these are also ideas I’ve been thinking about for a real long time but haven’t been able to do anything about while those other things were parked in the prime real estate.

I can’t tell you how much I want this. I want to see what my brain looks like once Codename: Telepathic Soulmates officially moves out and I’m not worrying about sequels. I can’t wait to devote that mental energy to something like Codename: Magic Elves or Codename: Ghostcatcher or that ever-evolving urban fantasy book that’s just dying to be born but doesn’t know what it wants to be yet.

I can’t wait to get Codename: Telepathic Soulmates out the door.

So let’s do this.