I recently passed the halfway point in a new book, working title Dead Man’s Tale. Around 17,000 words down, with 16,000 to go. My target is getting the draft done by May 18, but I’ll be okay with anything up to the 25th of May as I’m getting my feet under me now that public transport is going back to “normal” here in Brisbane and there’s room to type on a laptop during my morning commute.
To celebrate, here’s a little behind the scenes look at some writing data.
I’ve attached three images to this post. The first two are the RescueTime report for this project, tracking when I sat down to write for the period between April 26 and May 2 (a good writing week) and May 3 to May 9 (a not so good writing week). I take a look at these once a week or so, treating them like a heat map of my week that shows me when I’m likely to get work done and recognise patterns.
For the first half the week, you can pretty much see where I’ve got my schedule down: write on the first bus to work, then transfer and write again on the second. Make up some words on the lunch break, then write again on the way home.
The growing pattern here is that I’m terrible at writing on the last leg of my trip home. This is partially because I need to pay more attention on that leg of the trip – it’s the only time I don’t need to disembark at a major transit point. It’s also becuase I’m on a different bus home most days, due to the inconsisten schedules Brisbane is running right now.
Still, those day are largely sorted. I tend to hit my projected wordcount comfortably and advance the project in predictable ways.
My trouble spots are the last four days of the week, Thursday through Sunday. Thursdays and Fridays I work from home at the moment, and that disruption to my routine is playing havoc with writing. I do less in the morning, I don’t write through my lunch break, and I tend to get pulled into household chores right after I finish work instead of getting a last burst of writing in before I get home.
Weekends and public holidays like May 4 are the other tricky point. As I mentioned a while back, the stuff that outranks writing on my priority list are my spouse, my family, and my cats. Weekends are a prime time to devote attention to all three, especially given I’m either at work or commuting for eleven hours a day during the week.
In the past, the wee hours of the morning are usually a pretty good way to squeeze writing in before other folks are awake, but my spouse recently had a change in patterns and started waking up early with me. Saturdays are spent going to the local market and picking up fresh fruit and vegtables (also, coffee and food truck breakfast). Plus, it’s cold, and I don’t want to get out of bed any earlier than necessary.
The heat map is handy as I start looking at how to tackle this, since it’s a reminder that I don’t need big blocks of time to write in. Drastic action like “I’ll set aside two hours to write every Saturday” may actually be counter-productive, since my pattern leads towards short sprints. A solid block of time may be less useful than four short 20-minute bursts spread across the day in terms of hitting my word count goal.
The third image is the project as captured in my word count tracker, which provides some extra data like calculating my average WPH per session. It’s a useful reminder that not all writing sessions are created equal – some days I’m flying, and others things move at a crawl.
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