Recent New Processes and the Results: How I'm Managing 5k Words a Day

I came back from PNWA this year inspired by talking to Chris Fox, author of 5,000 Words an Hour, and adopted a new writing process, which has several parts. I want to emphasize that I’m pretty sure this is not a process that’s going to work for everyone. I have, for example, major luxuries such as a) no children, b) the financial resources for a gym membership, c) the time to make use of that membership as well as devoting a significant chunk of my time to writing, and d) good health and reasonably good energy levels. If this process sounds like one that might work for you though, I highly suggest you check out both the book as well as others by Chris Fox.

So here’s what I do.

I get up at 5:30 AM and drive over to the gym to work out, doing a mix of elliptical and rowing machine, mainly about 45 minutes to an hour’s worth. In recent days, when the fog has been thick, I’ve chosen to do an hour’s brisk walk instead. Yes, it is dark, and cold, and miserable. No, I am not looking forward to colder weather and having to de-ice things.
I come back here, eat my yogurt, start a pot of coffee, and begin writing with absolutely no Internet allowed, whether on phone or computer.
I write in Scrivener, (writing software I’ve been using for over a decade now, available for both Mac and Windows OS) and I set myself a goal of 5,000 words, keeping the word count tracking window open so I can see the progress.
I do a lot of 30 minute writing sprints, where I spend a few minutes beforehand figuring out what I want to accomplish in the scene I’ll be writing. Some of that will be typed, but if the flow is going well, I may switch over to dictation, using the Mac’s dictation feature, which I’ve come to favor over Dragon Dictate.
Usually by 9 or 9:30 AM I hit the 3k word mark, and at that point, let myself walk over to a local coffee shop to pick up a latte and a pastry. It’s a 10 minute walk (and that’s another luxury I have, pleasant and safe surroundings for such a walk.) I can text my spouse at this point, but no Internet access still, even when waiting in line at the coffee shop.
Sometimes I’m not sure I’ll hit my 5k mark by 11 AM but most of the time I do. (If I don’t, I keep writing till I do.)
I reward myself for hitting my goals, usually with something on a weekly basis, but I’ve also been known to promise myself a treat for the day if it’s hard going. The rewards of late are Breyer horses, which is something that I would normally never allow myself to splurge on. Apparently my inner twelve-year-old is a powerful motivator.

The Breyer that started it all, “The Girl from Ipanema” form th Equestral line.

Doing this has pretty consistently yielded 5,000 words each weekday along with another 5,000 spread out over the weekend, with the experience of the past few days, when I was at a writing conference but still managed two early morning workouts and 2,000 words. Currently I’m at over 93,000 words for the month of October. I’ve finished two books since PNWA: an adult novel as well as a middle grade one, and am currently 22,000 words into the sequel to the former.

I’m more productive overall and less likely to put stuff off (I think). Chris quotes Mark Twain as saying “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” And it’s true. Get it and soldier through something not particularly palatable, and other stuff becomes easier. It does seem that, for me, working on strengthening my willpower is paying off. Staying off the internet is better overall for my sanity I think; I know I’ve pretty much stopped paying any attention to the trollios because there’s just not enough time in the day and wrangling with them is pointless anyhow.

And what I’m writing is pretty good! Writing that fast means it’s fresher in my head and I’m less likely to lose my way or forget bits I’ve added, The “making it all fit together pass” is easier than with manuscripts written over more time.

So why say all this? Am I taunting you with my productivity? Absolutely not. But I am saying – I started pushing myself a little harder and I was surprised how much farther I could go by doing something that put me in my body and then avoiding distractions and focusing on writing in an undiluted way, free of email distraction. There was no mail so important it could not wait until 11 AM.

I did learn to get better about getting set up ahead of time, making sure my gym clothes were laid out, my headphones ready, and that I knew where Wayne had parked the car each night. One morning I ended up going to the gym in damp clothes and feeling quite virtuous; I’ve also been feeling a lot healthier, stronger, and more energetic as a result of this regime.

I also don’t beat myself up if I miss track. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to at Surrey, but I also spent some time napping and reading in order to maintain my energy level and stay at my best during the conference. Today it was so foggy that I didn’t drive over to the gym — but I still managed to get my 5k in, so hooray for me. Tomorrow will be another day.

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Retreat, Day 2

July 3, 2015

Photograph of a cat and lemons. — Lemons. Cat provided for scale

I’m holing up and working hard on the sequel to Beasts of Tabat. I let myself have July 1 off because that was a travel day, but yesterday I managed 5k words, though that last half was like pulling teeth. This morning I got up and sat down without checking e-mail and got 1000 out of the way. My goal is 25k each week until the middle of August, which should see me with Hearts of Tabat in a decent final draft, several stories I’ve promised to people completed, the YA novel further along down the road, and perhaps even some more of Exiles of Tabat (book 3) drafted. I will be teaching while here — tomorrow is the first section of Writing Your Way into Your Novel.

To keep myself honest, I’ll be posting word count and WIP excerpts.

So, yesterday:
Word count – 5k
Hearts of Tabat current word count – 82184
SFWA time – hour and a half on call plus e-mail plus skim thru discussion boards

From Hearts of Tabat, an early chapter, still in rough draft form.

This is what a riot looked like. Pink velvet darkened to plum by spilled punch, and flickers of angry firelight glistening on the sticky surface. Two shattered windows, broken glass spiderwbs in reverse, light from the aetheric lamps hanging over the street outside washing in, acitinic blue white over the parquet floor that had been Benarda’s pride, two hundred and thirty different kinds of wood, each dedicated to a different Trade God, zebra-striped bits of southern wood like dappled petals around her boots, as though she trod on clots of dirt-streaked snow, chips of mammoth ivory salting the petals in tiny white freckles.

A punch bowl, shattered by the first brick that had come in, landing soundly in the middle beside the overturned table, sending punch and bits of curved luster-glass everywhere, a great puddle of liquid changing the colors of the woods beneath them, tinting them dark and rose.

Two paintings askew on the walls, others lying on the floor in a jumble that drew the eye as much as their subject matter, impious and arresting, the torches that had set the rioters outside afire. Someone must have known what the paintings would be like, must have tipped people off, organized the crowd.

There. Marta’s eyes, glittering hate at Adelina across the room. Gods, even now the woman would rather hold her grudge against Bella rather than worry about keeping herself alive.

This is what a riot sounded like: angry shouts coming in through the windows, drowning out the frightened whispers all around Adelina (“Was that Bella Kanto who just went out? Of course I knew she’d be here.) Benarda somewhere behind the scenes, ordering someone else to do something, it was unclear what. The woman’s best chances of keeping her gallery further intact had just walked out the door in order to stand down the crowd, which had grown from the few dozen that had been here when she and Bella had first arrived, immediately after the now-absent Duke’s speech

This is what a riot smelled like: smoke and sweat and alcohol and all the mingled pomades and perfumes ““ who was still wearing vetiver, that went out last season? And what was that intriguing cinnamon and musk blend, was that an actual edge of rum in it or some remnant of the punch?

That was what a riot felt like: Leona’s small fingers in Adelina’s own, Bella’s tiny cousin and the center of all this clamor breathing hard, the gasps and gulps of air she took in when stressed.

Adelina’s own pulse beat fists against the hollow of her throat, pressed tight fingers behind her brows every time the streetlight struck her eyes, hammered at the pit of her belly, unnerving her.

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Urban Fantasy: Well, Sort Of

January 19, 2011

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — How wonderful were those early books? I loved those illustrations.

Actually, I want to talk about something that shaped American fantasy as we know as well as a series that I encountered early and have loved ever since and that’s L. Frank Baum’s Oz.

I’ve been reading Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, by Michael D. Riley, which is about Baum’s life and the worlds that he created. It’s a folklore that feels very American, and yet it’s a mythology that few have drawn on: John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Tad Williams’s Otherland (which has some delightfully demented riffs on Oz) are two that occur to me. I’d love to see more using it for sure. A recent anthology, Shadows of the Emerald City, holds short stories influenced by Oz. (I was delighted to find it for $2.99 on the Kindle and am looking forward to reading it.) (Later edit: Let me add Tom Doyle’s well-done story, “The Wizard of Macatawa,” to the list of Oz-inspired works.)

At the same time, it’s part of Baum’s theory of fantasy that can be used to lead the discussion back in the direction of urban fantasy (beside the alternate direction where I go on about how much I’d like to see urban fantasy that draws on Oz and what forms that might take). Baum posited six kinds of fantasy:

Stories that deal with marvelous machines and inventions of the future.
Stories that take place completely in the imaginary world without the appearance of any character from our own world.
Stories that explain origins (like Baum’s story about Santa Claus)
The adventures of American characters “in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches”
The adventures of fairies in our own world
The animal fairy story

Urban fantasy falls into that fifth catagory, with “fairies” standing in for a multitude of supernatural creatures (I just picked up a Judith Fennell one with a male mermaid). Sometimes the protagonist is human – maybe fifty-fifty, maybe a little more in one direction or the other – but supernatural creatures are always there, in one form or another.

Does that seem like a fair thing to nail into a definition of urban fantasy?

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