This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on July 28th, 2023. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.
"How are you writing so fast?!" a friend DMed me on Instagram yesterday, in response to one of my daily word count updates.
I wrote back with a quick explanation: my four-weeks-of-camp timeline, my 10-page chapter-by-chapter outline, my rule that I have to finish my chapter each day before I do anything else (including shower). But really, I wanted to say, "Thank you."
Every message I get, whether congratulating me for getting my daily words on the page or asking how I'm doing it, keeps me going. That's one of the reasons I've been sharing my word count tracker online for the past three weeks (and will continue to do so next week). At this point, if I miss a day, I think people will notice.
I have a professional deadline for this project: August 30th. But I've written in my newsletter before about the difference between the "zero-draft," i.e. the very first thing I write, and the "first draft" that I send to my editor or agent. I don't want my publishing team to read the earliest set of words that I basically splat onto my screen. Thus, I have to bake in some time for revisions. This year, the timing happened to work out perfectly: I have this four-week stretch of summer camp to hammer out words, and then three and a half weeks (only one of which is a camp week) before the actual deadline, to polish everything up.
Perfect timing notwithstanding, I would consider this fast-drafting. I don't usually push myself to get down approximately 2,000 words a day, every single (week)day. When I was writing the Class Critters books, I didn't have to; those books are shorter, and the challenge was to get each chapter to do its job in the fewest possible words (around 500-700). When I was writing my longer YA novels, meanwhile, the deadlines weren't this tight. Plus, I drafted my debut long before working with a publisher. In a nutshell, this particular drafting situation—35,000-40,000 words in under eight weeks—is new to me.
And...I don't hate it.
I am someone who thrives under (reasonable) pressure. If I don't have an external deadline, I often give myself one. I like making plans and sticking to them. So, this idea of writing a chapter a day for twenty days naturally appealed to me. I knew what I had to accomplish from the get-go, and I am making it happen.
Why share online each day? Accountability. Like I said earlier, if I miss a day at this point, there are people in my life who would notice. I've put my intentions out into the world. Now, I have to follow through.
But every book is different, just as every season of life is different. What's working for me this summer might not work at another time of year. I might have more on my plate. Or another book might not lend itself to the kind of outlining that has facilitated my drafting process this time. And of course, with my coauthored projects, I have to factor in another person's schedule and preferences.
I'm trying to enjoy this productive flow I'm in. I've written 28,607 words in 14 days (as of yesterday), and I have six chapters to go (one today and five next week). Then my schedule changes again: I'll be working while also running "mommy camp" for a week and a half, followed by traveling with my daughter and doing a school visit in my hometown.
When the stars align, as they did with this twenty chapters in twenty days marathon I'm in now—and when the writing flows, as it has been—this work is so satisfying. But it's also satisfying to find time to do a small, meaningful revision in an otherwise busy day. It's satisfying to add 2,000 words to a growing document, and it's satisfying to delete a scene that isn't serving any purpose, or to replace that long scene with a single, perfect sentence.
I enjoy what I do, and I'm happy to have the time to do it.
I'm thankful for summer camp.
And as I enter the home stretch of getting this zero-draft written, please hold me accountable. ;)
~Kathryn
What I'm:
Reading: I just reread Emily Henry's Beach Read, and, serendipitously, her newest book, Happy Place, just landed in my library queue. So, that is what I will be happily reading this weekend. Happy Place is a second-chance romance about a couple that broke up five months ago after an eight-year relationship, only to be thrust back together by their friends at an intimate cottage gathering on the Maine coast.
Watching: So much "Star Trek." The second season of "Strange New Worlds" is really fun! And with the way streaming services work these days, we have to watch everything of interest to us to on Paramount+ before canceling it again, which means rewatching some of the "Trek" movies...
Loving: My daughter's summer camp is science-themed, and it has really captured her imagination. I love that she enjoys the experiments, but also gets into the pretending aspect of it—for instance, the week they learned about detective science, she was basically a sleuth 24/7. Her big imagination is one of my favorite things about this age!
(Here's a new Little Free Library near her camp. Isn't this the cutest?)
