Writing Progresses

The writing is going quite well. Whenever I have a big gap of time between when I take a trip and when I start writing about said trip, I always worry a bit that I'm going to forget everything and have nothing to write about. That never actually turns out to be the case, but it doesn't stop the niggling concern. And it does, sometimes, motivate me to get writing sooner than I would otherwise, like when I knew I was going to write about both my solo trip and a coast trip, I got to writing on my solo trip in June (since I'd done the trip in May). And I finished well before the coast trip in July, so I didn't have to worry about forgetting two trips.

This year, I ended up waiting quite a while before I wrote about my solo trip. It's not uncommon for me to put the write-up off, but waiting until November is pushing it a bit. I think the reason that I waited so long was because I felt so conflicted about not finishing the exact trip that I planned out. But as I write about the trip, I'm finding so much joy. It was a really great trip.

I'm doing a couple things differently this year with my write up. First, I'm waiting to transcribe the notes that I took on the trip until after I write up that particular day. I find that this allows me to do my best to remember what happened (assisted only by the photos that I took), and then I can transcribe my notes and go back and add in anything that I forgot. I find that working the other way around constrains my mind to only think about the incidents that I wrote down at the time.

Second, instead of sticking to a 1000 words a day type schedule, I've been letting myself do what I can during the work week and then really putting the hammer down over the weekends. I know that I can write 1000 words a day and get through the writing portion of one of these books in pretty short order, but my brain doesn't always want to settle in to doing more work after I've worked all day. Especially when I've got projects at work that are eating up my brain capacity.

So I decided to experiment one weekend and ended up with over 6000 words for the weekend, and the next weekend I topped 8000. And I didn't spend the whole weekend writing, either. This system allows me to be flexible about how much I write during the week, and then really get things moving come Saturday and Sunday.

I'm hoping to finish up the writing portion of the solo trip by the end of next weekend, which will give my husband some time to read it over and make suggestions. While he's doing that, I'll be selecting photos, and, depending on how long he takes, starting to process and caption the photos. If everything goes according to my fantasy timeline, I'll be putting the book together over Thanksgiving.

Here's hoping that plan works out better than the one for the trip did :)