My Progress So Far

I just calculated the number of words I've written over the last 7 sessions. I started at 17,176. After 7 hours of work, I now have a total of 20,456 words, which is a total of 470 words per hour. I'll round this up to 500 words per hour. I have another 80,000 words to right to hit my goal of 10,000 words. Based on my rate of words per hour, that rounds up to about 160 hours more work. However, I suspect that I'll probably need to write considerably more to get enough material which I'll then plan to edit down, so we'll see how long this actually takes.

I am quite a bit below average today (188 words) because I spent more time developing the back story and organizing the plot.  Let me provide a little more info about how I go about writing.

First of all I keep a document in Google Sheets that lists all of the different scenes. It is a large table split up by chapter along the rows. In the columns I have put the main topics of the book, including Bear's story (the main character) and sections for the side stories, including about the Dopples (more to come later), the unlost cat, and a role playing game I created for the book called Ghosts and Ghosthunters.

I learned this approach to plotting after I read an article about how JK Rowling plotted her books. Of course there are all kinds of complicated, interleaving stories in the Harry Potter books, and it's tough to keep track of all the details, so JK sketched out the outline of what happened in each subplot in each chapter. Here's a link to a website explaining in more detail: http://blog.paperblanks.com/2013/05/j-k-rowling-book-outline/

Some other things I've tried doing:
I'm a programmer, and I like having everything organized. In my last post, I explained how I use html tags to keep the different sections of my book organized. E.g. when my character has a therapy session, I write it up like this.

<therapy>Therapy session scene here </therapy>

Other tags I've created - <NOW> (for news of the world),  <DWOD>(Depressing word of the day, which my character makes up for his library, he's a bit depressed), and <g&g> (for any scenes involving my ghosts and ghosthunters roleplaying game). These tags make my scenes easily searchable so that I can find them and move them from chapter to chapter as needed.

Definitely, this approach isn't right for all writers, or even most writers, but it's one that I find works well for me.

Time spent writing today: 60 minutes
Words written today: 188
Time spent writing so far: 40.7 hours
Number of words: 20,456
Naps today: 0 so far, but this afternoon holds promise.