Typing speed can be a big issue.  Also as for story telling, I've found that running a D&D campaign and having to react to characters who without fail want to roam around outside of the campaign manuels to be excellent training.  As is telling stories to my children where they can be the characters.  It started with little red riding hood, my oldest son only hadto hear the story a couple times before he wasn't going up the stairs to see grama but wanted me to finish telling him the story all the same.  Then all original stories with him as the star.

Other than that reading thousands of sci-fi/fantasy books.  Practice practice practice.

I spent about 8-10 years never getting more than 10k in a story down and was asked if english was my second language.  Then my life was falling apart and I decided I would either write a book or stop the dream.  I sat down and even though my story skipped between 1st person and 3rd person and it stank so bad my brother and I had to do multiple rewrites, I didn't stop.  Its a heck of a lot easier to edit a bad story than it is to write one.

My advice don't give up, don't stop, don't go back and rewrite.  Just type until its done.  Then go back and spend a couple weeks fixing it up nice and pretty.  You'd be amazed.




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I can do a little over 1k an hour when I'm motivated.  If I have an outline on paper and clear image of what I want to write inmy head I can burn through it.  For the 15k day I did 8k in 5-6 hours sitting at McDonalds where I switched out 3 fresh batteries in my laptop and for the remaining seven it took me something like 12 hours as I sat on the couch and just ground on it on the couch at home refusing to go to sleep until it was done.

Frankly with outlines I have two factors.  One I 'can' write faster when its there.  Two my motivation to write goes down because I know pretty much exactly what's going to happen so my fun level as a reader/writer goes down.

I figure that if you treat writing like a full time job and pull 1k per hour for 6-8hours every day then 6k+ per day is reasonable so long as its all plotted out before hand.  So I set my target for 5k as reasonable to achieve.  But if you're just putting a couple hours of serious work in every day then 2k per day is easy to accomplish.  Again if you know what you need to write about before hand and give it the same focus as you would the day job for that time.

Writing gives you back what you put into it and its great cause at 2k per day x 360 days you'd get 720k words written in a year and at 80k-120k for a book that's a minimum of 6 books you could write in a year, just working part time 2 hours/2k every day without fail.  With fail for weekends and holidays maybe 4 books.

It all depends on how many stories you've got ready and free time etc.

Best of luck with everything,



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120k - AI part 2



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5 years is too long for anything but a first book.  That said... Congratulations!  Its awesome you got a book out there.  Keep it up man!



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80k - AI part 2



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