Day Off Story Challenge - Round Two

The challenge - write one complete short story on my day of, once per week, start to finish. Using pre-thought ideas is okay, but not stories that already have more than a cursory word count.

The short of today's post - I was victorious, for the second time in a row. I was off on Wednesday, July 13, and I wrote for approximately six hours. I completed a 3,400 word SF story, entitled "The Day the AI Died". Go me!

The intention of this challenge was to write shorter, easier stories. I seem to have gotten away from this today, even more so than last week, when I banged out a 2,300 word story. My original goal for this challenge was between 1,000 and 2,000 words.

Both stories have been fairly straight-forward, as expected. My
alpha reader felt that the the last story was good, but the ending was too predictable. I have a sneaking feeling this one will have the same reception. Really original fiction may require more processing time than I am giving these.

On the other hand, the first few stories I ever wrote took far longer than these, and are much less interesting too me. So perhaps letting that startling plot twist happen, without spending days or weeks thinking of it, is a learned skill as well.

This story had a slight bit more background than the last one, a text file totalling about 200 words or so. It was also an idea I recorded on a voice recorder while working. It also bore little resemblance to the original concept.

This is not surprising, as I write mostly by discovery, and  none of my stories ever end up where I think they will. I rarely even start with an idea for the ending.

One really exciting fact is that this story is equivalent to about three days worth of daily writing goal word count, and will require very little editing. In practical terms, this is a week's output for me, done in a day. That creative momentum is a really powerful thing.

A Math Post

We all love math, right? There have been a number of math posts that have been helpful to me. So I thought I would show my personal math, how planning works for me.

First off, I am not writing full-time, yet. My goal is to be writing full-time in one year. That may sound like I'm over-reaching, but I'm not. The amount I need to make to replace my current income is pitiful. I am not rolling in riches.

This could be a negative, could be something that I let drag me down. However, my day job is very conducive to working on my writing education. An added benefit - this job will be easy to leave behind :)

Anyway, the math -

I write about 500 words an hour. I believe this to be a fairly average pace, at least among all the authors I have heard figures from. There are 40 hours in a normal work-week. 48 weeks of productivity in a year (time off for vacations, holidays, and sickness.)

500 x 40 x 48 = 960,000. Almost a million words.

Now, some more qualifications. I only edit as fast as I write, currently. So immediately cut that in half. Only 480,000 words. Two doorstoppers, four decent length novels, six slightly short books, or five shorter books, two novellas, and about eight short stories.

This is what I could get done, working a normal work schedule, if I was writing full-time. This is the hardest part of writing for me, actually, knowing how much more I could be accomplishing if I could go full-time.

My actual output is about 1,000 words a day, on average, in about 2-3 hours. Some days are much more, and some days (editing or not writing) are much less or none. I don't take days off, unlike the average work week above.

So my personal math-

1000 x 7 x 52 = 364,000. A little more than a third of a million. Only 120,000 less than produced by the full-time schedule above. Hmm...

So if I could average, say, 1,250 a day?

1,250 x 7 x52 = 455,00. 25,000 less than the full-time output. Double hmm...

So, what have I learned from my math? I am producing nearly as much as I think I would, writing 2-3 hours a day, as I would writing full-time. Absolutely nothing for me to feel bad about. The hardest thing to deal with as a part-time writer, wanting to be full-time and get more done, is a complete self-fabrication.

I am hanging a lot on that only actually writing new words four hours a day, of course. But I think that is pretty valid. So...


Wow.