Sleepy

It was a late night last night.  The last several days I’ve not come close to reaching my word count goals, but last night I was bound and determined to change that.

I started Masters using Word for Mac, but a few weeks back I heard about Scrivener on the I Should Be Writing podcast.  Mur raves about it on the show a lot, so I figured what the heck.  It’s got a free 30 day trial period, so there was nothing to lose.  Well it rocks.  It’s I guess an html-based app.  You can split up the document by chapter, by scene, however you want.  Then when you’re done it’s got a compiler feature that’ll format it for .doc, .pdf, .epub, .mobi or a bunch of other file formats with just a few keystrokes.  Reading around about the efforts people are going through to format things for kindle, or PubIt, or whatever, I’ve been wondering if I was doing something wrong.  But I’ve formatted both of my short stories for Kindle and brought them up on my Kindle for Mac application easily, looking good, after tinkering with the compiler for all of 15 minutes the first time, and under a minute the second.  So I’m counting myself lucky I guess.

Anyway, Scrivener has another little feature where you can enter your word count goals for the document as a whole, and for the current writing session.  I’ve had 1,500 set as a session goal for a while.  So far this week, I’d been unsuccessful in meeting it: 800 here, 400 there, you know the drill.  Last night, I determined I was going to meet 1,500 come hell or high water.  So I pushed through, and at about 1 am I managed, between head bobs, to get to 1,504.  Then I was up again at quarter of six to get ready for work.  As you can imagine, I’m a little bit loopy this morning.  But I read through what I wrote last night, and it’s coherent, so I’ll call that a win.

That brings me to 25,800 words or so on Masters, so in the last 8 days I’m averaging about 600 words a day.  Not what I want, and not enough to meet my goal of finishing by the end of April.  I need to pick it up a notch or two, it seems.  Oh, and I’m going to do another short story this weekend.  Should be fun.