LiveWriting Day 2020 is in the bag!  And like everything in 2020, it was a little trickier than expected, with some unanticipated glitches, and some slog points.

But like every LiveWriting Day I’ve done, it was also a lot of fun, a success, and a very good (if long) day.

I also did this on Twitch for the first time, which means I have some numbers I wouldn’t otherwise have.

Path to Affiliate

Requirements Met

Reach 50 Followers  – 9

Stream for 8 Hours – 12.3 (this includes a couple test streams before)

Stream on 7 Different Days (well, 4 earlier test streams) 5

Average of 3 Viewers – 3.5

The average viewers throughout the day floated around 3.8.  I have four different streams yesterday because I turned it off for naps and, once, lost power for five minutes.

Of the four streams, I have the largest unique viewers at 9 and 7 for the others, so the safe assumption is I had a total of 9 viewers!  Thank you, all nine of you!

I know at least two people were in the Drive document and not in the Twitch stream – and thank you to the two of you, too!

Oh, and I got one spambot!  I have to say, for all of the non-intuitive shit on Twitch, the moderation was super easy.  Ban! Blam!

I got a lot of good commentary, a lot of help with the naming, and a lot of help remembering what I’d named the darn things (thank you!) as well as catching some inconsistencies in the story, go drafts.

This is my first time (as far as I remember) trying to write solidly for ~12 hours on a single project.  It’s hard!  Doing a prompt call is a lot easier; I get to bounce between projects enough that I don’t start to feel… Confined.

On the other hand, it was very pleasing to get a solid base done on a story, a single story that is telling me where it’s going the  whole time.

Base on… Lyn, weren’t you going to write a 12000-word novella?

Ahem.

Well, about that.

I wrote 12,058 words between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. (with breaks for: nap, lunch, firewood, nap, dinner, so a little over 12 hours of writing).

I had an outline and I was using Jami-Gold’s Romance Beat Sheet as a loose approximation.  However, I wrote each scene as it, uh, seemed to need to be.

According to the beat Sheet, I’m at about here:

 Act One 

 Opening Image/ Hook

 Inciting Incident

 End of the Beginning

 Act Two 

 Pinch Point

#1 Midpoint        

HOWEVER, being a romance beat sheet, I feel like I need a second Act Two, i.e., the part where they find the McGuffin.

And I think I need to work the McGuffin more into the romance plot somehow.

So it’s going to be between 24,000 & 36,000 words when I’m done.

Monies I Earned

I received $8.61 in donations/prepayments for the eBook from three people – thank you, folks!

We’re a ways from my estimate for editing and cover art – $200 – but I appreciate every penny. <3

Things I learned

Okay, I didn’t learn this, but I already knew these two things:

* I need to get better at outlines.  I haven’t come to the part I didn’t outline well yet, but there’s definitely some gaps in Act Three and the end of Act Two of the outline.

* I really need story bibles.  When everyone is watching the screen, it’s more obvious when you need to scroll up to see that you’ve named the third city Sun-Kissed Eden again, or when you give up and write in [R-name] for the company and Anke or Eseme or Kelkyag fills in Rywald.  Again.

Twitch:

*  I had several windows open in the “share screen” browser, but switching between them was sort of obnoxious in the Twitch window.  I eventually opened the other things (the story bible, the wordcount sheet) in another browser to have them not show up on the Twitch window.

* I need to figure out the bot so it drops in things like “Here is the document link” because people won’t always scroll down.

* People expect sound.  Need to figure out sound.

Docs:

* Having people do Suggest Edit is so much better. 

* Having the shared folder with everything in it was a good idea.  I approve.

Polls:

* This worked out pretty well, but I gotta close the “premise” poll sooner.  I got thrown by a change on the last day and had to redo chunks of my outline because suddenly Won in a Raffle was ahead.

Other:

Stretch breaks are great.  Naps are double great.

 

Bonus: 

because of the setting I’m using, we ended up talking about Pern and Darkover.  I found this cool article on Mapping Darkover.  http://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/darkover/darkover_map.html

Also in general: If i could do writing 8 hours a day, it seems that 5-7,000 words would be a reasonable daily amount.  I mean, if I did it like I did it on Livewriting Day, like a solid 8-hour job, which let’s be honest, is not how I do, ah, my day job all that often.

But it’s good to know.

5000 * 5 days a week * 50 weeks/year:

1,250,000 words in a year.

(As a note, averaging the last four years, I write approximately 700,000 words/year “normally”.  Averaging the last 9 years, I get ~550,000 words/year)

Summary: 

My wordcount estimates still need a lot of work, but I made a solid beginning on the story as outlined and voted on. I met my goal – 12,000 words, intentionally over my shortest goal for this day but under last year’s total – but it was a struggle.

I think Twitch was fun and will probably do it again, but may need to make it more interactive somehow.

Good day, good friends, good God, let’s eat.

Also, I made a new setting.