Not a quarter of my book – I haven’t even hit 10k words in the rough draft (writing that, it’s a little depressing to think that 10k is some authors’ daily output – but that’s why I’m here, to tell it like it is for a first time author doing this on the side while working full time and supporting and interacting with a family). No, this is a “quarter” in the corporate sense.
I haven’t made great progress on the story itself. I have to be OK with that. I did put in a lot of time in planning, even if it wasn’t as thorough as I have done in the past (overplanning). I know there are pantsers out there who just sit down and write, but that isn’t an option for me. I have so many mental demands on my time that there is no way I could possibly keep my story in my mind alone. I need a pretty thorough roadmap on paper – or the screen in this case – that I can refer to regularly.
Over the last three months, I’ve faced a lot of distraction. According to my tag cloud, I have 35 daily posts tagged “Coaching”, which generally means that I wasn’t making any progress on my writing during those days. Today will be 37. That’s sobering. Over 1/3 of my days on this project have produced no writing toward it. But on the other hand, those coaching projects and the book sales related to my nonfiction blog have netted me over $1k during that span that I am going to funnel right back into my writing. It has allowed me to buy courses and a new theme for my website already. And it will help me fund my editing and cover later. I am pretty happy about that.
I’ll take one day out of three in order to keep this habit self-sustaining.
In terms of the actual writing, as mentioned above, I am nearly 10k words in and nearly at my First Plot Point/Inciting Incident. I finished my character profiles, mapped out the story with character arcs for each of them driven both by internal and external conflict. I have developed my world. I have done all of this while keeping my writing true to the premise and blurb that I wrote in advance. I’m happy with that.
I hope that by the end of the next quarter, I will have a finished first draft – though that would certainly be pushing my current word count goals, even with no distractions. We’ll see where I stand then.