How to Write a Book in 165 Days… More or Less
This week, I officially sent off book three (*cough* Chaos Reigning *cough*) to my editor, so I thought you might like a peek behind the curtain of how a rough draft comes about. Thanks to Scrivener, I have a detailed history of my word count for each day.
It is not very pretty, but I hope it helps some of you who write as slow as I do. You don’t have to write like the wind. You can write like molasses in winter and still write a book, you just have to hang in there and keep going.
Finishing the draft (not including a week of edits) took 165 days, but I only wrote on 124 of them. I started on February 18 and finished on August 1. For a good chunk of the book I was writing every day, including weekends. I prefer to take weekends off, but a deadline waits for no woman.
Let’s start with the overview before diving into the details. The monthly breakdown looks like this:
| Month | Word Count |
| February | 2,607 |
| March | 10,105 |
| April | 26,490 |
| May | 15,510 |
| June | 16,123 |
| July | 27,030 |
| August | 5,297 |
You can see that I really struggled in May. I had edits for TQA and proofs for AB, plus I always struggle in the middle. You can also see why, at the beginning of June, I decided to see if I could push my deadline back from July 1. I hated to do it, but if I hadn’t, June might’ve killed me.
Luckily, there was some room in the schedule, so a later deadline gave me a bit of breathing room. I actually took some weekends in June off, but I was still stuck in the middle, so between the two, my word count was not good.
In July, I realized I had to get serious or I wasn’t going to make it, especially because the RWA conference would take up an entire week. Sadly, my brain did not get on board with this plan and I went into RWA in a mild panic. Where I met with my editor.
In person.
…
