Writing Progress: Week Ending July 7, 2012

I’m a day late reporting my progress, for various reasons, but better late than never:

Book of M:

• Background Notes Wordcount: 0 words
• First Draft Wordcount: 1,351 words

Idea Journal:

• New Story Idea Notes: 405

Grand Total: 1,756 words

I didn’t expect to have such a productive week.  Then again, all of that productivity happened on one day with a good amount of unexpected free writing time.

The “Book of M” wordcount was spent entirely in revising and adding to some of the latest scenes I’d recently written.  This was something I’d already been planning to do over the past few weeks but  hadn’t had time to do yet.  I was immediately dissatisfied with those scenes upon having written them, and I’d made some notes to myself on what I wanted to change about them.  I’m somewhat happier with the end-result.  So, in fact, the 1,351 words I wrote was a net addition, but that doesn’t count the probably 200-ish words I had to delete as part of this update.  I didn’t keep track of those words that were deleted, so that’s a rough guess.

I have a few more revisions of scenes I’d already written that I want to do, though nothing quite as major as what I did to those recent scenes.  For example, I was inspired by a recent news report about the CEO of Barclays addressing members of the British Parliament by the first names to reconsider how I thought about and used names in my story.  So that’s some stuff that’s queued up before I continue on with new scenes.

As for the Idea Journal, that’s an interesting story.  Saturday morning as I was slowly waking up and slipping between wakefulness and dreamfulness, I had a couple of odd but vivid half-dreams.  I thought that the content of those half-dreams was interesting enough that they could serve as idea seeds for future stories.  So, I used my idea journal for its intended purpose and wrote those ideas down.  The wordcount totals from my Idea Journal are based on a simple mechanism I use to estimate wordcount: Each full page of writing constitutes a certain number of words, and each line of text on a page that isn’t full constitutes a certain additional number of words.  Those totals are based on averages I calculated by manually counting up words on pages and lines over several dozen pages way back when I filled out my first several idea journal entries.  It’s also based on the assumption that my handwriting is consistent over time… which is perhaps an erroneous assumption (as you’d understand if you saw some samples of my handwriting).

So that was my week-in-a-day of writing.  How was yours?