I am pleased to announce that I am now making good progress on 1500, the third and final book of the Timeless Trilogy. I expect it to be ready for release around December 15, 2015, about a month earlier than expected.I started writing this book a couple of months ago, somewhere at the start of August. As of last weekend, I had only written about 15,000 words on it out of about 60,000, so I was making slow progress on most days, if any at all, and was finding it hard to find any motivation to write. After all, I worked all day long and came home tired. I was struggling to get even 500 words done per day. Last week, I wasn't sure if I would ever finish this book at all. Every time I sat down to write, something would come up that would interrupt me--usually one of my cats.
Then I picked up a Kindle copy of Chris Fox's 5,000 Words Per Hour. It recommended that I try writing as fast as I can in short bursts, distraction-free, a few times per day. The book (which is a short, easy read) outlined exactly how to set up a distraction-free space and how to plan out what you're going to write before you do it. I decided to give these writing bursts a shot.
I started on Monday with one distraction-free, 5 minute burst. I shut my cats out of the room. I sat down with my Netbook (which I've disabled the Internet on), put on a pair of headphones, listened to some classical music and started a timer. I wrote as fast as I could for that five minutes, and wound up with 400 more words than I had before.
The next day, I decided to try three six-minute bursts of writing: one when I got up, one on my lunch break at work, and one before bed. The result: about 1100 words written for the day. I felt like I hadn't even done any work, the bursts went by so quickly.
On the next day, I upped it to three seven-minute bursts. 1300 words written. Again, I felt as if I hadn't done much work, yet I still had a good chunk of a chapter done.
The next day, I managed 1700 words and the next, 2,000 words.
Yesterday, I was up to three nine-minute bursts, all of which were quick and didn't interrupt my day. I managed 2,200 words, and today, on three ten-minute bursts, I'll probably reach about 2,500 words written for the day. All in all, I've added about 10,000 more words to 1500 in only five days-- far more than I've done in an entire month. And I'll be drawing closer to the end faster and faster each day.
If I continue to write using this technique, I can expect to release 1500 to my early reviewers probably in mid-November, and release 1500 for sale in early to mid December. That's a whole month earlier than I originally thought!
And this is great news for my future novels as well. I have two more trilogies in the planning stages for 2016, a survival fantasy and a science fiction. I'm working up to eventually doing three 20 minute bursts of writing per day, every day. That could mean 4,500 to 5,000 words written each day. Once I reach this speed, I'll be able to complete a first draft of a novel in about two weeks. With the editing added (and of course there will be lots of that) I may be able to release a novel in only one to two months after I begin work on it.
