Well, it happened. Things got int he way of me reaching my goal this week. It’s been a bit stressful at work, so I took a couple of easy nights.

I still got a decent bit done on the revising front, though, so I’m happy about that. Luckily, I have a chance to bounce back.

This week, I got caught up in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, the not-quite-talk-show by Jerry Seinfeld that has recently been added to Netflix. If you like comedians talking about their craft, I highly recommend it. My favorite episodes so far: Jimmy Fallon, Norm Macdonald, and Michael Richards.

I’m kind of used to these “lulls” in my motivation at this point. I saw it coming on Monday when I could not think of anything to write to save my life. My Tuesday post turned out well, I think, but I had to strong-arm myself into writing it.

Understanding your own work habits is half the battle, in my opinion. Once you can anticipate when you might have a down day, or week, or month, it’s easier to pick the work back up and move forward.

Revisions, Revisions, Revisions

7,000 words revised was the magic number this week, far below my goal of 24,000.

In total, I’ve revised 38,000 words, taking me through chapter five of The Warden of Everfeld: Memento. My estimated pace of about 4,000 words per word has held up, so I’m sticking to it.

With about 166,000 words left to revise and just five weeks until my self-imposed deadline of February 28, I need to average a bit over eight hours of work per week to finish.

Starting tomorrow, I have a rare free weekend. PW and I seem to travel a lot in the early part of the year. Next week will mark three out of four weekends we’ll have gone out of town. So this weekend will be crucial in helping me make up some lost ground.

Chapter six of Manuscript: Beta is 8,500 words. My goal is to revise 24,000 words before Monday rolls around. That’s about six solid hours of work between tonight and Sunday evening.

The lack of any major sporting events besides WVU basketball (vs. Kentucky!) will be a boon to this goal.

If I can do that in just two days, then cobbling together five or six more hours of revision time during the week should be comparatively easy.

Getting out of bed at a reasonable time has been difficult this week, so I’m changing up my alarm schedule (again). We’ll see if it works out better for my morning slog out of bed.

Oh, and my book cover is just about finalized!

Goals for 2/1

1. Revise at least 40,000 words of WoEM
2. Finalize my book cover
3. Wake up.

Steve D