Writer’s Log, 12/4/13: 20,000 Words

I just went past the 20,000 words mark in my book. It took me about 3 weeks to write the first 10,000 words, but just over half that (8 working days) for the second 10,000. And yes, I am tracking my daily book progress too, amongst all the other self-tracking I’m doing!

I’ve now written 4 chapters, give or take some gaps that need to be filled. In terms of pages, I’ve written 43 pages so far in Apple’s ‘Pages’ software, the equivalent of Microsoft Word. Apparently a good working average of words in an actual published book is 350-400 per page, which would make my work-in-progress 50-55 pages so far.

Soon I’ll need to do style editing and nitpicky re-writing on the chapters I’ve done so far. That will considerably slow down the daily word count rate. So I’m not overly concerned with how many words I’m averaging a day. It’s more important that I stick to my monthly goals, which for this month is to have 4 chapters completed by end of April. I’m well on track for that.

I’m also really pleased that I’ve got a good writing flow going. Flow has always been important to me as a writer. I need to have set times to write and I work better with distractions turned off (I’m looking at you, social media!). Also, with each new chapter, I’m getting better at writing book length material. That’s been a steady transition for me this year, after a decade of blogging.

As always, stay tuned for further Writer’s Log updates. Onwards!