This book

My writing habits for the past week have been all kinds of ridiculous.

I don't remember writing this much, or writing this productively, since I started to write. In the past six days, I have written over 14,000 words in my new manuscript. That's an average of about 2,300 words a day. That's on pace to finish NaNoWriMo in 21 days.

It doesn't sound like much, but for me, that's a lot.

I'm a student. I have two majors and a minor. I work two jobs. For the past two summers, I've been taking classes and working. I'm in a long term relationship. That all to say, I do not have a lot of time or energy to devote to writing for my future.

In the past six months before I started this project, I had probably collectively written about... oh, I don't know. 500 words. (Not counting school stuff because, well, come on. Being a journalism major puts a lot of black and white wordage under your belt.)

And yet, this past month and a half, things have been different. I've been emailing back and forth (and pretty much every day) with my CP. I've amassed over 5000 words in notes for this story. And now I'm on pace and I've set writing goals to have the first draft of this story finished by the middle of July (taking into account the reduced time I'll have to write once school starts up again).

And, because of all of the work that my CP and I have put in to plotting both of our stories before we got too deep into writing it, I know I can do it.

Deep down, I always knew I'd be an outliner. My computer files are organized with countless folders, I have a system set up in my email to filter emails for different classes and from different professors. Spreadsheets and lists are among my best friends. I am a complete sucker for organization.

But in the past, for some reason, outlining was never a priority for me when I was writing. I'd go in with a premise--just a spark of an idea--and figured that I could figure it out as I was trying to pound out my words and get the story down. If I spent too much time planning it and plotting it, I reasoned, I would lose steam. I wanted to get that story out NOW.

I realize now that the pantsing method is so not my method.

I follow Rachel Aaron's method in 2K to 10K and plot out what I'm going to write beforehand. I just take a few minutes every day and figure out what comes next in the book; I'm always a few steps ahead of what's actually happening. I use my big outline to get the context of the story, and use these smaller plotting sessions to fill in the blanks: who's talking to who? What are they talking about? Where are they?

It's helped so much.

This most is mostly me reveling in my success from the last week. There are only a few more days left of spring break, but I'm confident this upward trend will continue. I'm looking forward to it.

This book is something else.