Word count: 96217 | Since last entry: 2758

I’ve been very good at meeting my 1000-words-a-day writing goal since the Solstice, and the result has been that the novel is absolutely flying by. Compared to the months I spent thrashing around in mid-year, things are now happening so fast that I’m having trouble keeping it all in my head. This is both in terms of events per chapter and in terms of events per writing day, though mostly the latter.

The events per chapter count is definitely much higher, though. Where I felt before (in mid-novel) that I had to come up with more stuff to fill out the chapter, I now (just finished chapter 13 out of 16) am having trouble getting everything from the outline into a chapter of reasonable length. There may be some rebalancing and squishing-about of stuff in the revision phase.

My current writing pace has me finishing a chapter a week rather than a chapter every three weeks. At this rate I’ll finish the first draft by the end of this month, as planned. Look at the uptick at the end of this chart!

I have to point out that I have not increased my writing speed, only my writing productivity. I still draft at around 300-500 words per hour, but I’m putting in more hours per day. The downside is that most days I’ve been getting to bed after midnight (but still generally waking up around 6:30, a habit from my working days I have been unable to break). What I should really do is start writing earlier in the day (duh!) but the press of Other Things (chores, decluttering, email, LiveJournal) and stupid inertia has prevented that so far.

Today is going to be a busy day and I should really be doing something more productive than graphing my word counts in Excel (I tried to use iWork, but I couldn’t figure out how to import data from a text file) and blogging.