JUNE STATS
Full Days Writing: 5
Partial Days Writing: 3
New Words: 1376
New Chapters: 0.3
Total Word-count: 47,133
Total Chapters: 13.3
For a while now I have reported declining numbers each month, and each month come up with a plan to resolve that, and each month that plan hasn’t worked. Consider how many words I have written each succeeding month this year:
January: 6360
February: –
March: 5244
April: 3747
May: 2751
June: 1376
A very steady trend down, and fast approaching zero. For June I said I was going to start tracking partial days and full days of writing, in order to encourage me to write something even if only a small amount.
Ultimately, that did not pan out. I’m sure I could make up a number of excuses for why my numbers are continuing to decline, such as starting at a new job and generally having less time due to the new baby in our family, those reasons would sound hollow. The simple truth is that my motivation has been declining. There have been many days in the past months where I could have written…and just didn’t want to.
I am far from giving up on this project, though. I still do care for the story, and frankly have put in too much time and effort to call it quits now. I’m still going to keep working on it, and will hold myself to a higher standard moving forward.
To this end, I am making the following changes: no more partial-days/full-days, no more “my goal is to write this many days for the month,” no more set amounts of time to write for, and no more set amounts of words. We’re just going to go back to basics. My goal is to write every day, full stop.
I will still track how many days I write, and how many words, so that I can measure trends, but there will be no more quotas. This might seem counter-intuitive for increasing productivity, but really I just want to get rid of all the clutter and bring the focus back to pure writing. Perhaps this plan will backfire, in which case I’ll just re-evaluate it at the start of next month.
Wish me luck!
Though I wrote very little for the month of June, I did write some, and here is a snippet from that work. Enjoy!
The next day William digs some burlap sacks out of their gear and throws them in a pile on the ground, next to his cutlass and field journal.
“How many sugarcanes are out there?” Clara asks him.
“I think it actually is just ‘sugarcane,’ even when you’re talking about more than one.”
“What?”
“Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, so how many sugarcanes are there.”
“No, see, if there is just one sugarcane you just say ‘one sugarcane.’ And if there are two sugarcane you still just say ‘two sugarcane.’ Just like ‘one sheep,’ and ‘two sheep.'”
“So how many…”
“Sugarcane.”
“…sugarcane are there?”
“Well…I didn’t count their number exactly, but back when I was taking inventory of the island I did estimate what I saw. A few dozen here, about a hundred there, and so on. In any case there’s more than a thousand of them.”
“More than a thousand!”
“Or at least there had better be! I’m counting on it!”
“So that we have enough for filling our field?”
“Exactly. Each cane that I bring back should give us about four or five setts–that’s what you call the chunk you plant in the ground that the new stalk grows from–and it will take more than sixty-six hundred of those to fill our whole field!”
“Well Daddy is going to be busy all day!” Clara laughs to Eleanor, who is now walking up to the two.
“Aren’t we all, and every day?”
“Yes, and with no holidays,” Clara pouts.
“Now that is a problem” William concedes. “But for now, the cane isn’t going to wait.” He picks up all of the supplies that he has prepared, kisses his wife and daughter goodbye, and treks off for the first cluster.
Give Me Pen and Paper 