...but, it turns out, we should have been trying a little harder.
In January, we wrote just under 18,000 words, with a rewrite or two, and we were quite pleased with that particular number. We don't have anything to show you, not yet, but the words are there and things are coming together. (Don't bother checking for a new title at Amazon or Smashwords or any of the usual suspects. We're not done yet.)
It turns out, we shouldn't have felt so good about ourselves. According to our indie guru, Dean Wesley Smith, we truly are slackers. In his post of a year ago (here) (and, yeah, we're slow readers, too), he talks about writing speed and what it means to someone's career.
For example, DWS says it takes him an hour to write 1,000 words. At 1,000 words a day, working five days a week, your average novelist can pump out three novels a year. Sadly, we're not your average novelists.
On a good day, we manage 500 words in a three hour period. Then the next day, we rewrite those words, lose about 50 of 'em, and we've totaled 450 words for our total output. Oh, and three hours is about all we've got before the mind rebels and we're done.
So, yeah, January was a successful month for us, since we saw an average daily number of 580 words for those 31 days. Until we came across our mentor's post (the Magic Bakery, hidden inside The Store Thing, is his idea), we thought we were smokin'.
And, then, no longer quite so pleased with ourselves, we did another edit. Our 18,000 words slimmed themselves still further. For January, we knocked out 15,000 turns. So far, the first week of February, we've plotted our next effort. Total word count: Zipadee Zero.
If you read the beginning of Dean's post, you'll see this sentence: "The slow writers in this new world of publishing are going to have trouble." He means it. DWS clearly believes that volume is key to an indie writer's career.
We're doomed.
In January, we wrote just under 18,000 words, with a rewrite or two, and we were quite pleased with that particular number. We don't have anything to show you, not yet, but the words are there and things are coming together. (Don't bother checking for a new title at Amazon or Smashwords or any of the usual suspects. We're not done yet.)
It turns out, we shouldn't have felt so good about ourselves. According to our indie guru, Dean Wesley Smith, we truly are slackers. In his post of a year ago (here) (and, yeah, we're slow readers, too), he talks about writing speed and what it means to someone's career.
For example, DWS says it takes him an hour to write 1,000 words. At 1,000 words a day, working five days a week, your average novelist can pump out three novels a year. Sadly, we're not your average novelists.
On a good day, we manage 500 words in a three hour period. Then the next day, we rewrite those words, lose about 50 of 'em, and we've totaled 450 words for our total output. Oh, and three hours is about all we've got before the mind rebels and we're done.
So, yeah, January was a successful month for us, since we saw an average daily number of 580 words for those 31 days. Until we came across our mentor's post (the Magic Bakery, hidden inside The Store Thing, is his idea), we thought we were smokin'.
And, then, no longer quite so pleased with ourselves, we did another edit. Our 18,000 words slimmed themselves still further. For January, we knocked out 15,000 turns. So far, the first week of February, we've plotted our next effort. Total word count: Zipadee Zero.
If you read the beginning of Dean's post, you'll see this sentence: "The slow writers in this new world of publishing are going to have trouble." He means it. DWS clearly believes that volume is key to an indie writer's career.
We're doomed.
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