Forty days you wish.
Day 1
This may be the stupidest idea I've had in a long while, and a yawn to most sensible people; but it might also be of interest to my readers and to other writers.
I've begun a new novel and I'm planning to chart its progress day by day on this blog. I'm not sure about this wizard wheeze; I've always felt like blogging is a distraction from what I really should be doing, which is cracking on with the novel. On the other hand if I include my wordcount for the day, every day, it's a public admission of what I've done or failed to do, and that in itself might be a spur for me to crack on.
So, some days might just offer a wordcount in figures, or the reason why there's a duck's egg on show for that particular day, or some musings and analysis about what's happening while the novel is emerging.
I don't intend to discuss the subject-matter of the book, just the process. Technical matters. Structural stuff. Creative issues.
So I made a start and I hit 2055 words on the first day which is good for me. A decent day for me would be 1500 words, and though I often dip below that figure, I don't usually settle for less than 1000 words. So I'm off and running. In theory for an 80,000 word novel that's just 40 days to turn out a first draft.
I wish.
In any event the end of the first draft is just the beginning of the early-middle.
I don't work at week-ends, and some days the peripheral and administrative business of writing takes me away from my keyboard. But generally I work in a routine. Some days it comes easy; some days I feel like I'm busting coal from rock with a sledgehammer. So we will see.
As for the wordcount, I made a false start and backtracked, so the opening figure might be more like 3000 but I only count what's on the vine for me to look at the next day. I don't count tinkering as I go, only the end-of-the-day tally. In general I tend to hack on to the conclusion of a draft without finessing, noting as I go big fixes to be done later, but in truth there is always some minor rapid-fire fixing along the way.
The most difficult question is how long you should spend grooming and saddling up your pony before getting on its back. It's always different. Some ideas germinate slowly in the dark backbrain for years before they get dragged into the light. This particular idea has been fairly lucid in my thoughts for a good few months now, but I suspect its origins go back a lot longer than that. You can't second-guess your own unconscious mind. Anyway the idea was there and a piece of music coming at random gave me the ignition.
What's more I'm free from a lot of clutter and things that have been soaking up my time and the way ahead for this idea seems - at the moment - very clear.
I want to avoid being mysterious in this account but I can't get away from the fact that some of my novels seem to pop out like loaves of bread from a baking tin and some have to be scraped out from the back of the oven. I don't know why. I always pray for the former; I often get the latter.
Forty days. That's a quarantine period isn't it?
