The Story Thus Far (And The Start of Book Number 1)
I started my first manuscript in late October or early November of 2014
This is my first attempt at writing anything of this length. Not even completely sure what kind of story I wanted to write, I kinda started one story and then a second. Not too much writing, but just deciding what genre, a bit about main characters, what the main conflict would be. A few paragraphs and notes got written. Not much. I was not still sure how to continue.
Finally, one of the stories seemed to click.
For me, that means I got beyond “It was a dark and stormy night.” I finally found a beginning to one of the stories and had something written. Not more than a few hundred word, but for me, that was a lot.
I think I even managed to type about three hundred words on my phone in a couple hours I had where I had nothing else to do. Also, a great deal on a netbook came along sometime just before Thanksgiving and that has become a great help.
I had to pause writing at the end of November.
Life gets in the way. Lots of things are more important than fiction. It was just not possible to write even when I took the netbook with me.
Getting started again was slow. I hit a few roadblocks (how to I get the story to move on from here). I did not get much done in December.
In January, I solved some of the problems and started to write again. I may have reached 4000-7000 words total by the end of January 2015.
What helped most at that point was sharing what I was doing.
I shared what I wrote with a few people. The encouragement they gave me has helped me push much harder. It has become easier. I am writing more and more.
During February of 2015 I doubled what I had written in nearly three months before. Bringing my total word count up to around 15000. While that is just a start and a small fraction of a book, even most of that was done at the end of the month.
The last few weeks, writing has become an obsession.
I want to write. I feel like I should be writing when I am not. It has become an addiction.
I want to know what will happen next and I don’t know till I write it. Yeah, I am not much of a pre-plotter yet but more about plotting and planning a book some other time.
I ended February 2015 at just about 20000 words.
Over 5000 of that was in the last week of February.
And that’s pretty much where I am going to leave you. From here on, I’ll give a progress report on Tuesdays (so there will be another post again tomorrow). I often have the most time to write over the weekend and into Monday right now (I don’t do this full time). With much of the writing being done then, I think the best time to report progress will be on Tuesdays.
So, this Tuesday will get the first report on my progress for March so far. I will let you know this, progress accelerated quite a bit and even more so the first part of this last weekend.
That’s all till tomorrow, I need to write.
James
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