Amazing how quickly the tables can turn.
My April novel update consisted mostly of a depressed lament about how little I’d gotten done not only in the past month, but the past year—it took me almost nine months to completely finish the third draft of this novel after I went back to full-time Day Job work, and the fourth draft was progressing just as slowly.
Now, though, things are different: two weeks ago I made the final edits to the fourth draft, after working on it every weekday since I left my Day Job. That means it only took 16 working days (chunks of two and a half to four hours from late morning to early afternoon) to finish the last 275 pages of the draft, which averages out to 17 pages per day.
When the final page was done I shifted gears and started devoting my mornings to a Large Project For This Blog That I’ll Unveil Later, while I spent my afternoons on a Medium-Sized Writing-Related Project That I’ll Also Unveil Later. My reasoning for this is that firstly I wanted to get both of these projects done, and secondly I wanted to let the novel edits sit for a bit before moving on. This made the timing seem just about perfect.
Next I’ll start in on the retyping—that’s the stage where I type my handwritten edits one by one into the Word file to produce a stronger and cleaner draft, which also forces me to familiarize myself even more with the novel. Unlike the actual editing process, I prefer to work on retyping at the end of the workday since it’s a less intensive activity that requires minimal thought—I can basically sit down and work on it anytime, even if I’m not in my ideal work mode. As I reach a stopping point on the Medium-Sized Writing-Related Project I’ll shift to using my afternoons and evenings for typing up edits, and hopefully I’ll be able to start in a day or two.
Focus Leads to Progress
My productivity over those 16 days occurred for one reason and one reason only: I focused on the novel first.
This seems like a basic observation, but it’s worth explaining (this is a blog, after all) because of how important that focus has been in getting me back on track. When I was working full-time at my Day Job, I had to schedule novel work around that Day Job, in addition to everything else I was doing. Since writing a novel doesn’t come with any external deadlines, novel work often shifted down to my lowest priority, and a good portion of the time I didn’t work on it at all.
The great thing about scheduling all of my own time, though, is that I’ve been able to start each and every workday with novel work, thus making 100% certain that I make at least a little bit of progress every day. This is an exponential increase over how often I was working before—which then translates into an exponential amount of actual progress.
I was genuinely surprised by how fast the pages added up—I’d been expecting to be pushing through the draft for another 2-3 weeks at least, though in retrospect I’m not quite sure where that estimate came from. It shows how much more quickly you can finish a project if you set it as your primary goal, especially if you give it higher priority over Day Job work. And that’s a lesson I’m not going to forget ;-)
The Finish Line
From here I’m hoping to have a fully finished fifth draft by July 1st—a pretty important milestone, since the fifth draft should be the one that’ll actually be ready for people to read (!!!). Finishing the draft by July should also give me plenty of time to send it to a few close readers before I leave for Japan, since my last few weeks before departure are guaranteed to be insane. Posting this goal on this blog makes it more real, so I say bring on the challenge!
Oh, and if you want to be one of those first few people to check out the new novel, just lemmee know ;-)
Keep in touch—I’ve always got more cool stuff to share! Like But I Also Have a Day Job on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, or sign up for my occasional email update list. (Seriously, do it right now before you forget!)