#rdmo26

Happy to share I am vibing again with Hell's Half Acre and "finished" Chapter 1. For now. The first half of the train robbery reads nice but a plot hole forced a rewrite of the latter half so that part isn't as polished.

My main obstacle now? Perfectionism and discouraging editing while writing. Reworking a chapter over and over until it is ready to publish is fine for fanfiction but not for a novel that will need major revisions regardless if it remains as is or becomes a standalone.

Goals for June

Participate in Rough Draft Month and write 10K

Try different strategies to discourage revising while drafting

You see I can't be trusted. If I put "No editing! Just write!" on a post-it note, it gets ignored. If I write that at the top of the document, I forget about it the moment I scroll down.

Going to try using a new document each session, along with sprints and body doubling. (Open to suggestions as well!) Daily writing is difficult due to work so I am aiming for 2500 weekly. For accountability, I have to post an update by June 15th. Wish me luck!

What are your writing goals for June? ♡

I've decided to participate in @roughdraftmonth's June Challenge (It's picnic themed and so cute!) in an attempt to get back into writing.

I'm keeping it simple: 10 minutes or 100 words, whichever comes first, every day. I can obviously go longer, but I'm not beholden to anything beyond that.

I'm going to be annoying and reblog this post with my word counts for accountability. Expect a fairly long reblog chain by the end of the month; sorry not sorry. Block #Gemma's RDM 26 if you don't want to see it.

Even with 5 days with no writing, I soared past my original 10K word count goal, ending June with 12,550. Full details below the cut.

Can't really argue with the results. Saying to hell with perfectionism and avoiding revising while drafting* allowed me to hit that number. I will continue to write the first draft of Hell's Half Acre in this manner but the goal will change depending on what's going on at work that month.

* There was some revision. I realized part of Charlotte's chapter would be better from Elijah's POV. Since this would change how Chapter 5 unfolded, I had to rework it. I didn't start a new document every session but when a scene was completed, I moved it over to a separate "Act One" document. Since writing was going well, I didn't engage heavily with sprints or body doubling.

My goal for July? Write 7K.

How's your summer going? What are your writing goals for July?

Happy to share I hit my accountability goal of 5000 two days early!

It's been an interesting experiment. In 13 days, I've made roughly the same amount of progress on Hell's Half Acre as I did during the first six to seven weeks of working on it. That tells me I'm going to have to keep doing this if I want to finish the first draft in a reasonable time frame.

I haven't completely eliminated editing while drafting. I seem to turn to revising on bad brain days. It's easier than coming up with new words.

Am I happy with what I have written? Not really. It's not a mess, but it's not pretty. That said, better for it be written out and ugly than beautiful but trapped in my head.

How is your June going? What are you working on? ♡