Thursday 8 March 2012

Breaking the barrier

I've broken through the 10,000 word barrier on the YA novel.  Starting a new project's easy - just bash away and a few thousand words later you've made a good start, but it's keeping up the momentum for the 'middle bit' that can be a problem.   Work/family life etc can throw up unexpected diversions that mean the writing gets shoved back to the bottom of the pile.
Small goals seem to work best for me.  I'm aiming at a 60,000 word count for the novel - when you're right at the beginning and only on 3,525 the chances of ever reaching the golden 60,000 seem pretty remote.  So for now I'm working on smaller goals ... climbing up to 10,000 didn't seem nearly as hard or impossible.  It also means I'm 1/6th of the way through.   I'm going to work to a 5,000 goal each time - I've set up an Excel sheet and every time I do any writing/editing on my chapters I frantically do a word count at the end so I can enter the figures and see how what the total word count is, how many to my next mini goal and also how many I need to write to reach 60,000.  Currently I need 4,050 to get to 15,000 which is only around two chapters worth ... if I can get them written by the end of Sunday I'll have a celebratory G&T :)

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