between drafts

collateral tales

Just checked. For my dissertation, I wrote around 146,000 words in six months, alongside my usual daytime (or rather nighttime) routine, work, and stuff; moderate to extensive run-time editing included. Which amounts to almost 25,000 words per month for six months in a row, that’s not too shabby. It was followed by three months of editing and later three months of rewritings and reeditings after feedback from my professor. In condensed MLA style (line spacing 1.5 instead of double-spaced, block quotations single-spaced), 440 script pages all in all.

• Of course, everything was done, set, and ready in terms of sources read (around 40,000 pages of literature & literary criticism over the course of three and a half years), citation corpus (around 4,000 script pages of scanned, OCR’ed, and fully documented quotations), chapter and subchapter structure with headings and titles, and some vague ideas about how I might fill them.

For the first novel I wrote, I managed to hack away 108,000 words in 6 weeks, with a good deal of run-time editing, alongside my then-usual routines which included visiting my then-girlfriend in Berlin over the weekend and stuff. I just kept writing every free second. In this case, with fiction, my writing speed was 77,000+ in 30 days, which is again not too shabby. I fired off a first volley of outlines and excerpts, and edited the stuff for another two months. In regular manuscript style (double-spaced etc.), 410 script pages all in all.

NaNoWriMo is, what, 50,000 words in 30 days? Bring it on! Then again, I don’t have kids, so imposing handicap weights should be in order.