Talking Shop: Eric's Writing Challenge Update 16

To date, I've written about 82150 words toward the 87,500 word goal. That puts me about 94% of the way toward meeting the goal. I wrote about 4500 words on the urban fantasy over the last couple of weeks. That works out to about 2250 word each week or around 320 words per day.

Yeah, the writing challenge update is lot less exciting now that the first draft of Rinn's Run is complete. Still, I expect that people are wondering about the drop-off in productivity. There are practical and psychological factors in play. Let's dissect those a little. 

Finishing the first draft of Rinn's Run and being so close to meeting the writing challenge goal has taken a lot of the mental pressure off. Before, people were waiting for a completed book. I had tens of thousands of words to write. I was doing it all publicly. Now, the draft is done. I've written most of the tens of thousands of words. Unless I get hit by a bus or lightning or some other terrible and unforeseeable thing happens (knock on wood), hitting the writing challenge goal is a forgone conclusion. It's a lot harder to keep churning out 500 or 1000 or 2000 words a day without some of that pressure bearing down on you. There's probably a lesson in that for me and anyone else who procrastinates.

On the more practical side, moving directly from a novel you just completed to a partially completed novel in a completely different genre and told from a different POV is a bit of an adjustment. I ended up killing some time going back to check earlier chapters for details I thought I remembered. Then, I stopped doing that and just went back and read what I had from the beginning to help recapture the voice and remind myself of the plot threads I had going on. Honestly, it's been more work than I expected, which slowed things down. It also gave me a pretty clear picture of how much revision is in store. Perspective and a few years of practice means things that seemed good before seem only acceptable now. 

At this point, though, finishing it has become something of a point of pride for me. I will finish that book come hell or high water.

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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.