SUSAN TIPPETT BRAITHWAITE

What a week! The last seven days have just flown by. I can’t believe it’s time for another journal entry already.

I upped my writing goal to 4,000 words last week without really looking at what scenes were coming up.

Writing in Adam’s or Elle’s point of view (POV) is easy enough for me to slip into. I can happily go from one to the other and back again without too much mental prep.

But, the next scene wasn’t in either of their POVs; it was in my bad guy, Trevor Blackwell’s. To write Trevor, I have to do a fair bit of mental prep to really get into his skin. Add to that that I haven’t written in his POV since the end of last year. Yip, I started to doubt my 4K word goal right out of the gate.

Review 10th – 16th March 2022

Here’s what last week’s goals looked like:

• Add 4,000 words to Running the Asset‘s manuscript, taking it to 89,235.

How Did It Go?

On Thursday, day one of the week for me, I got myself all set up… and sat for over an hour trying and failing to get into Trevor’s head. I either had him too nice or too monstery. So, I ended up working out on paper what I wanted to see from him. It worked. Somewhere between the second and third page, I found him.

Having nailed him down, I started the timer on the not-so-great app I mentioned last week and hammered out 1073 words.

Friday was a weird day. I had an appointment later in the morning, which required some rejigging of other things, but it luckily freed up some extra writing time. Allowing me to add 1505 words!

Hmm. Saturday. Boosted by the previous day’s word count, I was raring to get on with the work. I set the app for a thirty-minute sprint… it died after ten. I reset it. It died after ten. Again, and again.

I tell you, doing the writing in ten-minute sprints is so draining and infuriating that I honestly thought I wasn’t going to break 500 for the day. But, shockingly, I hit 1094 words.

As happy as I was with the result of the day, there was no way I was doing another massive series of tiny sprints for the rest of the book. I needed a solution and fast.

Years ago, I’d bought an app called 5000 WPH by author Chris Fox. It wasn’t on my phone, but as I’d got it through the App Store, I could just redownload it. Nope. It was gone, no longer in my past purchases.

My only option was to come up with a spreadsheet. Not a fun task when you don’t deal with them for numbery stuff. But, as I opened Numbers up to stumble around making one, I saw an old file called 5KPH just lying there. It was a freebie sprint sheet I’d gotten from Chris Fox!

Sunday was my biggest writing day of the week, and I was ready. I was also flagging so much that I wanted nothing more than to crawl under a blanket on the couch and play some old Splinter Cell games. But, if I didn’t do the job, no one else was going to. I managed to force myself to sit down and get the writing done. I added 1871 words before I had to stop–due to hand pain.

I added 5,543 words, taking the manuscript to a total of 91,796!

This Week’s Writing Goals

• Add 5,000 words to Running the Asset’s manuscript, taking it to 95,796.
• Follow up interview with Marsha (this time on Zoom?)–if you haven’t had a chance to read my interview, head over to Marsha’s site to check it out.

See you all soon!

That’s it for today. Thanks for stopping by, and take care.

Susan