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Posts Tagged ‘word count’

ROW80 Update 7/19/15

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged editing, goals, iphone 6, ROW80, soul of a vampire, word count, writing on July 19, 2015| 6 Comments »

Well, I finally broke down and got a new iPhone. I got the iPhone 6, and I’m pleased that it’s much bigger than my 4 (I skipped the 5). I didn’t want one as big as the 6 Plus, though. I got the 16 GB one, which was the least expensive one. My 4 only had 8 GB, so I think 16 is plenty for me. Verizon has stopped doing the two year contracts. What you do now is pay full price for your phone in 24 months. Then they give you a credit on your phone bill each month. I also lowered my data plan to 2 GB since we had 4 GB of data and usually only use a half GB. So doing it this way, my phone bill will only be $2 more more month, and I have a brand new phone. Yay, me.

Wow, I’m sure you all skimmed that part of the post. How boring!

So onto ROW80. Here were my goals for the round:

1. Make my monthly word count goal of 12,739 for July, 12,740 for August, and 12,329 for September. (Based on 150,000 words for the year.) So far, I’m pretty much on track with this.

2. Finish writing the second in the mystery series written under my other pen name. It looks like this is going to happen unless I get swamped with editing jobs. I have one going and three coming up, but as long as they don’t all send them to me at once, I’m good.

3. Write at least 250 words a day on the sequel to Soul of a Vampire until I’m finished with the mystery, then readjust the goal when I’m writing ONLY that. (I have trouble writing two stories at once, but I’m going to try to write a LITTLE on that second story.) I’m behind on this one. I’m still trying to adjust to writing more than one story at a time. I did write 346 words on it today, so I’m getting there.

How did the rest of you do last week?

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ROW80 – Round 3 Goals

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged goals, mystery, ROW80, sequel, soul of a vampire, word count, writing on July 6, 2015| 11 Comments »

I seem to waffle between doing really well for a month, then slacking off for a month. I need to stop the slacking off! I got off my game because of something that had to do with my writing, but after talking to a few encouraging people, the whole thing seemed to be one person’s issue, so I feel better. Still, I haven’t completely bounced back from it. There was a lot of discouragement involved. I have to get over it.

Anyway, I didn’t make my word count goal for the month, so that’s put me behind for the year. I’m also way behind this month, but I have time to catch up, and that’s my intention.

Goals:

1. Make my monthly word count goal of 12,739 for July, 12,740 for August, and 12,329 for September. (Based on 150,000 words for the year.)
2. Finish writing the second in the mystery series written under my other pen name.
3. Write at least 250 words a day on the sequel to Soul of a Vampire until I’m finished with the mystery, then readjust the goal when I’m writing ONLY that. (I have trouble writing two stories at once, but I’m going to try to write a LITTLE on that second story.)

I’m on vacation this week, so that could either help or hinder my writing, depending on what we’re doing that day.

I’m hoping this will be a great round for all of us!

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ROW80 Update 6/14/15

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beta reading, editing, ROW80, word count, writing on June 14, 2015| 11 Comments »

I usually don’t get a chance to relax on a Sunday morning with my coffee and my laptop. But I got up early this morning, so breakfast was made and eaten early. And here I am with a little time to kill before church. 🙂

I realized I didn’t get all my sponsor duties done last week, and I apologize for that. I had Vacation Bible School all week, plus I’m doing a beta read/edit, so I was swamped. Things have calmed down now.

Because of aforementioned VBS and beta read, I hadn’t touched my WIP for two weeks until yesterday. I’m way behind on my monthly word count, but I managed to get over 1300 words in yesterday. Since that’s 3 times the amount of daily words I need to meet my monthly goals, it helped me gain a little. So now I have to average a little over 600 words per day to meet the goal, which should be doable.

My vacation is coming up in three weeks, and I’m really looking forward to that!

I guess that’s all!

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ROW80 Update 5/31/15

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged editing, goals, ROW80, shakeology, word count, writing on May 31, 2015| 8 Comments »

I was a cleaning machine yesterday! Since I’ve been drinking Shakeology, I have all KINDS of energy. Oh, wow, I just sounded like a commercial. It’s true, though! 🙂 I got so much done yesterday, some of it stuff I’ve been putting off.

Oh, and I got some good words in yesterday, too! I’ve been neglecting that since I had two editing jobs that needed to get done fairly quickly. Now, in order to make my word count quota for May, I have to write over 1400 words today. I usually don’t write on Sundays. But I WANT to make that quota. Can I do it? Maybe….

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ROW80 Update 5/6/15

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged accomplishments, ROW80, word count, writing on May 6, 2015| 4 Comments »

I feel like I’m really accomplishing things this month. 19% of the month has gone, but I’m at 29% of my monthly goal, so that’s good. I’ve written 3653 words in the past three days. Also good. I’m almost done with the novella I’m writing for an anthology, so it will be off to editors/beta readers soon. Then I can concentrate on the other two books in the queue. I really think it’s possible I’ll make my 150,000 word count goal for 2015!

By the way, I broke a rule in one of the sentences in that first paragraph. Who can tell me what it was? 😉

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ROW80 Update 5/3/1

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged juvenile diabetes walk, pantsing, plotting, ROW80, word count, writing on May 3, 2015| 7 Comments »

Just a really quick check-in before I get ready for church this morning.

I finished April off with about 4,000 words over my goal for the month. So that’s good. I took the last two days off from writing to do other stuff. Yesterday, I walked over 4 miles in the Juvenile Diabetes walk. Then I went to a Mother’s Day banquet yesterday afternoon hosted by my mom’s church. Sometimes there are other things we have to do besides write.

I’m kind of stuck in the plotting for my second Hemlock Ridge Mysteries series written under my Catherine Lynn pen name. I have the basic plot, but there’s some important stuff I’m not getting. I’ll probably go ahead and start writing, because a lot of my ideas come WHEN I’m writing instead of before. That’s why I like pantsing better. I think better during the process of writing than the process of plotting. I’m trying kind of a combination of both. I know the basic things I need to know for the plot, just not all the details. Does that make me a “plantser”? Hmm, a new word.

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ROW80 Update 4/29/15 – Looking Ahead

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged goals, ROW80, word count, word count spreadsheets, writing on April 29, 2015| 11 Comments »

I want to look again at my long-term goals for this check-in and see where I am.

This year, I want to have published four things under my Catherine Lynn pen name and one under Lauralynn. I’ve accomplished two of these so far. I have one novella in a two book anthology with Ruth Ann Nordin (writing as Barbara Joan Russell) which is through Parchment & Plume Publishing, and I published Brewing Up Murder (which is doing surprisingly well right now), the first in the Hemlock Ridge Mysteries. I’m about 2/3 into a novella I’m doing for an anthology, so that will be done soon. My next projects will be writing the second Hemlock Ridge novella and writing the sequel to Soul of a Vampire. SoaV was a little complicated to write, and I think the sequel will be equally so. I’m going to give myself plenty of time to write that one. We’re only four months into the year, so I think I’ll be able to write it.

Another goal for the year is to write 150,000 words. This might not seem much to you, but with what little writing time I actually have, it’s a lot for me. So far, here’s what I’ve done. My nifty spreadsheet (you can find them HERE) divides the 150K into monthly goals based on how many days are in the month.

January – Goal: 12,740, Written: 12,890
February – Goal: 11,507, Written: 10,454
March – Goal: 12,739, Written: 1,779
April (so far) – Goal: 12,329, Written: 14,776

As you can see, I got way behind in March. But I’m at 120% of goal for April, so I’m slowly making that up. I’m still 9,416 words behind for the year. If I can just keep up my momentum, I can reach my yearly goal. Can you tell I love spreadsheets?

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ROW80 Update 3/8/15

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beta readers, editing, mystery novella, ROW80, word count, writing on March 8, 2015| 11 Comments »

You know, I used to blog all the time. Fun posts. Interesting posts. Now, it seems all I do is ROW80 updates. Not that those aren’t important! They are. But if that’s all I blog about, then I’m reaching only authors and not non-author readers. I need to change that. I don’t know what happened along the way to make me stop. Probably just too much stuff to do and not enough time. Hopefully, the full time job will slow down a bit in the next week or two.

Now…about that ROW80 update. I haven’t written any words yet, except for edits on my mystery. I just finished that, and I need to get it to beta readers. (I haven’t asked any of them yet.) I had a name picked out for my little town, but unfortunately, Kait found a series by the same name (Pine Hollow). And I want this to be a series about this town. I would LOVE to hear some ideas for a small town name. Throw some at me! Even if you want to be silly and give me goofy names, it will still be fun. 🙂 I should have had this name decided before I started writing, but it just wouldn’t come to me, and I didn’t want my zeal for the story to run out while I was piddling around thinking of a name.

Hopefully, when I get the proofreading jobs done, I can get back to some serious word count on my WIP.

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ROW80 Update 1/11/15

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged goals, ROW80, word count, writing on January 11, 2015| 10 Comments »

Most of you know I’ve been VERY sick. Bleh. I feel like I’m on the mend, but I’m still not well. This means I haven’t been super productive lately.

However…yesterday, I wrote over 2000 words. I was really into the story. I think part of it was because I was in the middle of an action scene, and I really like doing those. I used to be afraid of them, but one time a reader told me they thought I wrote good action scenes, so now I’m not afraid. Isn’t it funny how just a little bit of encouragement can help us so much?

I had an early birthday celebration with my family last night since I’m going to be out of town for my actual birthday next week. I also had to go get a gift for my daughter-in-law’s birthday, so yesterday was a busy day. I decided I would write first and then do everything else later. That really works for me. Write first.

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ROW80 Check-In 10/29/14

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ROW80, WIP, word count, writing on October 29, 2014| 6 Comments »

I’ve written two days this week for a total of a little over 1100 words. I was trying to shoot for 5000 words a week, but since I sort of fell out of love with my WIP, I’ve backed off a little to regroup. It’s coming back together, but I’m not going to push too hard. If I get 2500-3000 this week, I’m okay with that. There it is, short and sweet!

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