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By Leslie, April 1, 2010 5:11 pm

In March I wrote 100,000 words.

I subscribe to the not very controversial but hardly ever followed notion that what you measure you will improve.  I want to improve my writing therefore, I set goals and monitor them*.

I also do other things but this is a pretty simple thing that anyone can do.

So, when I decided to write, I first made sure that I embedded that daily writing habit  as deep as an ingrown toenail (ewww) by using Don’t Break the Chain and then moved on to more granular daily progress tracking in a spreadsheet.

What do I track?

Two things: (1)Total NEW WORDS WRITTEN each day and (2) Progress measured by word in each scene for my WIP.

100K in March

Words written can come from my WIP but don’t have to, they can come from anywhere just must be NEW WORDS WRITTEN.

This is the source of the 100,000 March words.

I monitor all the words I write and rewrite, but it is  NEW WORDS WRITTEN that is in the words of Steven Covey’s “Habit#7: Sharpening the Saw” improving my skills.

I’ve been tracking this in my spreadsheet since December when I logged 45K,  January for 65K, on to February a week’s vacation an illness and 45K, and now with March and 100K!

I’m not sure I want to keep the 100K pace each month. March was odd. My husband, decided that he wanted to read my WIP.

AWWWKK!

Can you say crash revisions?  See that huge bump mid month. That represents several days spent in jammies and bunny slippers while I madly revised the first half of San Francisco so he could load it up on his Kindle and take it with him to Europe. I actually wrote most of that  bump over a couple of days but they were so hectic that I did not log them at the end of each session. Bad Leslie.

So, what am I aiming for?  For me, a solid productive day is about 3+ K. After that my eyeballs cross and I cannot think. And actually that is roughly 60+K for a 20 day month. It’s also a rare day that I don’t write so that 20 is really a 30 unless there are vacations. Although on the weekends I may only write 2,000 words a day.

Girl’s gotta have a break.

Huh…guess I will be doing close to that 100K won’t I?

Oh yes, I rewrite a lot.  My approach to revision is to review what I have written and then rewrite it, often from a blank screen.  What I wrote two months ago looks very different from what I write today. I like the today stuff much better. My short stories are improving, too. Probably should start subbing those again, eh?

As I learned from software, often the best approach to re-factoring (rewriting in software-lingo)  is to tease out the essence and rewrite the code from scratch.

[*There will be an update post here next week on my quarterly goal progress. Stay tuned, more African mammals will star.]

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By Leslie, March 21, 2010 11:00 am

Galaxy Quest is one of my all time favorite movies.  Partly because of the wackiness, I love wacky, and partly because it is just so damn hopeful.  In what place can a bunch of out of work, has been actors save an entire planet with the help of a bunch of not-so-thinly-veiled Star Trek geek kids?  I love it.

This movie is on the Dow family watch-a-million-times list along with Notting Hill and Terminator. Don’t ask, it’s my family and I love them.  So what does any of this have to do with writing? Well I was trolling the TED site the other day. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It is a non-profit that is dedicated to bringing together thought leaders in these ares and have them cogitate. There are TED conferences and much of the content is available on the site.

Last month Janet Periat gave a wonderful presentation to our local SV-RWA chapter on presentation, positive thinking and success. I was poking around on the TED site. One about success by Richard St. John. Which is a summary of asking successful people what made them successful. The clip is three minutes and well worth a watch, but the summary both from Janet’s talk and from this video is all summed up in Galaxy Quest!

Never Give up! Never Surrender! And in St.John’s words don’t be afraid to work through the CRAP: Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure.

If you want more TED…

My son, Walker, had just sent me a link to a TED talk that was making the gamer rounds by Jane McGonigal about how gaming can make a better world. Her premise is that if we focus all these gamers on a game that posits a world ending problem, they might come up with a solution. She uses an example from ancient greece where there is some evidence that a king did just that.

Walker is a WoW  gamer and wanted to show me this, more than just to validate his many hours of WoW play…I hope.