I’ve upped my game a bit. After listening to Michael La Ronn’s podcasts from 2020, I’ve decided to try and increase my daily word count. Micheal calls it Beast Mode. I have a daily habit where I start writing after work ends. I get a couple of hours of writing time before I normally stop. That can usually net me 2k words. I had one day this week where I woke up early and got out of bed and wrote for a half hour before my normal daily routine started. I ended up netting 700 words. I also spent time while my wife was cooking dinner to squeeze in another 1,000 words. We skipped our normal exercise hour on Wednesday and took a break, so I filled that hour with another 1,000 words (we only skipped our routine due to a pulled muscle). So what were the results?
- Mon Aug 15: 1,756 Supercomputer
- Tue Aug 16: 3,170 Supercomputer
- Wed Aug 17: 4,113 Supercomputer
- Thu Aug 18: 3,265 Supercomputer
- Fri Aug 19: 2,614 Supercomputer
Current Plans
I’m not really changing plans. The newly released Daphne book, Stolen Property, has had a couple of KU readers pick it up and read it. I saw an increase in KU reads starting with the first book in the series and the readers worked their way through each book. It’s only a couple of readers, but I’ll take it. I appreciate that someone is reading the series. It makes me feel better about getting the fifth book done. I was starting to worry that I might be wasting my time. My logic went like this: If nobody reads book 4, then book 5 will never get read. Fortunately, once a book is written it can sit there for future readers without requiring my time to do something.
I’m planning to keep up my own beast mode writing until I knock out Supercomputer. The prequel book named Daphne will remain on the back burner. I still haven’t made up my mind when I’ll complete that one and if I’ll use it as a reader magnet. I have 16k words written on Daphne, so it would be a waste to not complete it. I just passed 18k words on Supercomputer, so I’m over a third of the way to completion on that book. Also, I have the cover, so that makes Supercomputer a done deal.
I really want to clear the deck on the Daphne series and wrap it up so I can plow my full attention into the Abyss series. I have 51k words written for the first book of that series and a million notes on what I need to fix already. It’s almost at the halfway point. So, it’ll be the largest book I ever wrote. There are so many characters and their stories are intricately connected. I haven’t figured out what I want on the cover and I don’t even have a name for the first book. I need to get that done as soon as I can, otherwise, it’ll hold up my release date on the book. I usually come up with the name for the book first with an elevator pitch. I’ve been trying to get covers done before I get to the rough draft, but custom covers take two months to create. I’ve created my own covers in the past (all the MacKenzie Steele series books) but I’d like to up my game and not have to spend too much of my writing time on the cover design.
Now it’s off to write another 5,000 words (or more).