The novel is officially underway

You can’t possibly go through the experience I went through this weekend and not be inspired to write. I mentioned earlier that I did some outlining at the ball game earlier today on the expanded version of my novella, “Graveyard Shift”. I had enough to get started (finally) actually writing, and this evening, I wrote the first thousand words, which is about half of Chapter 1. I’ve seen these fancy little graphs that allow you to track your writing progress, but the graphs take all the fun of out working it out yourself, so I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way. Therefore, here are the assumptions for my own little progress checked:

• Today is Day 1
• I will write 500 words/day and write 5 out of 7 days in the week (or a total of 2,500 words/week)
• I’m aiming for 90,000 words, which would put my target completion date for the first draft 36 weeks (252 days) from now, or on December 30, 2007.

Therefore, at the close of 1 day I am 1/252nd of the way through my schedule, or 0.4%. I am 1/90th of the way to my target, or 1.1%. In the future, I will list these as “schedule” and “writing” percentages. If the writing percentage is greater than the schedule percentage, it means I am ahead of schedule; if it is less, I am behind schedule. I’m aiming, of course, to stay on or ahead of schedule. 1,000 words in a single day in almost half of my quota for the week. So today was a good day!

It seems like a waste of time to track progress, except for the fact that I have never attempted to write something that is 90,000 words long and had a great deal of difficulty writing something that was 20,000 words long last year. The tracking, therefore, is more to set milestones for myself, though it may be of general interest to others. If you don’t find it interesting, I’ll keep it behind LJ cuts in the future and you only have to look at it if you want to.

Oh, incidentally, “Graveyard Shift” was a very good title for the novella, but it doesn’t work for the novel because the novel takes place over a longer period of time. Therefore, the working title of the novel is presently, NextLife and that is how I will refer to it in the future.