When I work on long fiction, I use a spreadsheet I got from David Gerrold to track my progress. last year I fixed a few problems with a couple of the algorithms, then David modified it some more. It works great now.
Because I track my progress, I can compare the rewrite of my first novel with my terrible progress on my second.
This first graph shows my activity on Neanderthal Swan Song. The blue line shows my daily word count. You can see the gap at the end of January when my wife’s mother broke her hip. You can see a couple of extremely productive days. The yellow line is the % completed. This is 115,000 words in about 5 months.
Now, let’s look at Rigel Kentaurus. You can see monday nights, my most productive night of the week. I sit at my daughters’ piano lessons for two hours and write. The big gap between January and March was when I was working a lot of hours and under a great deal of stress. There is a surge in March, but it petered out. Hopefully, the most recent peak will continue to expand. So far, this is just under 17,000 words in 7 months. I did add about 250 words this evening.
