JUNE STATS
Days Writing: 10
New Words: 2893
New Chapters: 1
Total Word-count: 79,993
Total Chapters: 22
At the start of June I mentioned the new schedule that I was making for myself and threw out some pretty bold predictions for how many words I’d be able to write! And, well, obviously that’s not how things went for June. My numbers are better than they were in May, so that’s nice, but only a third of the potential I had been talking about.
Am I too shocked? No. Let’s face it, I’ve had a lot of plans to shake things up, and they’ve only ever brought temporary, moderate success. I’m glad that I keep trying new things, and I want to constantly experiment with my process and find new improvements, but perhaps I need to be a bit more realistic in my approach.
Which leads me to yet another new experiment to try! As I mentioned, June was an incremental improvement over May, and my goal for July is to make it an incremental improvement over June. Rather than looking for the miracle plan that triples my output all at once, I’m going to look for more gradual advancements.
In June I wrote 2,893 words over 10 days, so for July I’m just looking to do 3,000 words over 11 days. That seems very doable, and if I do succeed at that then I’ll raise the bar a little higher for August.
Come back next month to see how things went, and in the meantime, here’s a small piece that I wrote during June.
And by this he discovers the third great problem. In all of these three hours he has not even toppled three hundred stalks, less than a tenth of the field’s total. That alone would be of little consequence, if all he had to do was fell the cane he could have the task done within a week, but stalks of sugarcane is not what is sold back on the mainland, sugar is. And he cannot put the sheathed cane into the crusher, so the outer layers must be stripped off first, and these bind very tightly to the stalk indeed.
Stripping them back is a long and arduous process. Either he must grip their tips with his fingers and peel them back, one small piece at a time, or else he must slash the length of the stalk with his cutlass, wasting whatever chunks of inner cane come off with the leaves. If cutting the cane down had seemed a slow process, it is nothing compared to this! He dedicates five full hours to the task, and in that time he barely cleans fifty of the cane. A quick arithmetic tells him that if he were to work for ten hours at this current rate he could cut down and strip only eighty-five stalks of cane! Further arithmetic informs him that the entire field of three thousand cane would therefore take him three-hundred-and-fifty-hours of labor, or two weeks of working night and day without a moment’s relief.
And he is very sure of those calculations, for he has an immensity of time to double-check and triple-check them as he slowly strips the outer leaves from his hopes and dreams.
Give Me Pen and Paper 