Making 'Baby Grand,' the Novel

Set a daily word count. When I first started writing this blog, I committed to writing 2 pages a day of Baby Grand. However, on some days, that meant writing only about 300 words if there was a lot of dialogue, and I didn’t feel satisfied. In years past, I’d set aside a specific time, from 8 to 9 p.m., for example, in order to write, but more often than not, something would come up, and I’d have to change the time or go to bed disappointed. In June, I decided to commit to writing 1,000 words a day in order to finish Baby Grand and was able to write some 42,000 words in six weeks. In setting a daily word count, you know by the end of the day how much you’re written, and because there are no set hours, you have the whole day to do it — perfect for a mom like me whose days seem to be one big interruption. (BTW, National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo — starts tomorrow, if you want to try writing a 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time. If I weren’t spending November revising Baby Grand, I’d be right there with you.)