Time Management Tuesday: Another Month-long Unit

My May Days buddies like to make another month-long group binge-writing effort in the fall. This year I'm working with them during the month of October. The plan, once again, is to write two pages a day, and report how we're doing each Monday.

I have probably discussed the issue of whether or not two pages is all that difficult a daily task. It's not. The issue is that writing has become something writers do less of than in days of old. That bugaboo marketing, in all its many, many manifestations, takes up a lot of time, but so does teaching for many writers, workshop planning, public appearances, and submissions. Finding time for the real creative work involved with writing can be an effort, even if you don't have problems with staying on task. It's particularly difficult if you're trying to get started on a new, book-length project.

My plan for my own personal Octoberfest, as I'm calling this month's unit of time, is to:

• Sprint at least five days a week
• Generate two pages of material as many days of the week as possible
• Allow the two pages of new material to include new scene planning, if need be
• Learn to do what I'm going to call skim writing, meaning I'm going to try not to stop to get obsessive about perfecting factual bits, names, etc. I want to leave ______ or bold placeholders, which I hope will help me move ahead generating material that will provide the solutions for those blank spaces and placeholders that I can then go back and correct. I get bogged down much, much too often with those types of things for my taste.

And, of course, I hope to be able to wring another blog post or two from this experience.

I have already done today's two pages. Now I need to go off to do some marketing/networking types of things.