Author's Notes on: Dividing up a Project

With the end of my year primed to be PACKED with deadlines and goals for The Cardinal Directive, it felt only fitting that I should discuss the general process I use for breaking up a large project into smaller ones, and hopefully give some ideas of what you might be able to do for your own projects.

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When I officially decided I wanted to end Season Two of The Cardinal Directive before December, I knew immediately that I was setting myself up for a very tense few months ahead of me. But how tense? Enter step one.

Quantify

The first step for me is just to answer a few basic questions.

1. What is my goal specifically?

2. When do I want to accomplish it? How much time do I have?

3. How much work is really involved in getting what I want?

The first and second were easy answers. My goal was to finish Season Two with enough time to revise and publish a paperback/hardcover version by the end of the year, AND to finish with over 100,000 words. That meant that I had (at the time) only 4 more releases of season two if I kept splitting the Friday release. Removing Sleepless’s slot would give me 10.

The third question was more in depth, so I did what any reasonable, well-adjusted person would do: Made a dedicated tab in my spreadsheet for Author’s Notes. In this tab, I included:

1. The word counts of every previous Mission Log

2. Room for the remaining Mission Logs

3. A section that calculates the total word count of the project so far

4. A section that subtracts the total word count from 100,000 (to see how many words I have left to write)

5. A section that takes the remaining word count needed and divides it by the number of remaining mission logs, giving us a number that represents how long each mission log needs to be to reach 100,000 words

6. A section that calculates the average word count of a Mission Log in Season Two, for comparison to the average I needed to hit to reach 100,000 words

This spat out several data points for my consideration.

Currently, season two sits at a word count of 64,110, leaving 35,890 words until 100,000. This means that the (now 9) remaining Mission Logs need to account for roughly 3988 words each to reach my goal, where the average word count for mission logs so far in season two is 3474 words.

I hear you, I hear you. “Madeline, that’s a lot of numbers! But what does it tell us?” Enter phase two.

Interpret

All those numbers are great, but what am I supposed to do with them? What do they actually mean?

Well, they definitely meant we couldn’t have a Sleepless slot AND a Cardinal slot. I needed every available Friday slot I could take up if I wanted to get this done. It also meant that if I needed to get 4,486 words done per week, I would need to write about 641 words per day, which is doable if a bit of an odd benchmark.

To put it in context, most weeks I get a lot of my work done between 2-3 several hours-long writing sessions, each of which accounts for 1.5-2.5k words on average. So 641 in a day isn’t so bad, and there are days where I’ll even be ahead of it because it’s extremely rare if at all that a writing session will produce less than 1.2k words, which is almost double what I need per day.

However, 641 per day is accounting for doing a little bit of work every day, where clearly, I’m adjusted to a schedule of doing large blocks of work on a smaller subset of days. Even if I’m accustomed to doing bigger chunks of work on certain days, I will still fall behind if I don’t have a plan for having enough 1) content and 2) time to actually get those writing sessions done.

So, let’s assume bare minimum, to give myself leeway and say that each writing session I do, I expect 1.2k words to come of it. The number we need to hit each week is 4,486, so I need to adjust my schedule to account for the possibility of 4 writing sessions. Conversely, I can adjust my schedule so I don’t stop a writing session until I have 2,000 words at least, which means only 2-3 sessions as normal.

Something I’ll definitely have to watch out for is that this can easily snowball. If a mission log release ends up only being 3,000 words, the average word count needed to reach my goal on time will be higher! And if I don’t meet that average again, it’ll continue to go up!

Honestly, though, the word count itself isn’t really the issue. The issue is more the pacing of the content therein — I don’t want it to feel to readers like I’m just padding my word count. I want my words to count. If I have an idea for a mission log that only really takes 3.5k words for a really solid, strong mission log… I don’t want to extend it by 1000 words just to appease the goblin in my brain that wants to hit 100k by the end of the year. I will not sacrifice quality for quantity.

There is a workaround to this, though: Supplemental files.

For anyone not familiar with how Cardinal works, each Friday that we have a release, a Mission Log will come out that contains the main story. However, occasionally, I will have content that just doesn’t fit anywhere in a Mission Log, which will be released separately on Wednesdays as a Supplemental File. Generally speaking, the supplemental files (at least, the story-based ones) are in the range of 1000 words on average.

Having some of the week’s dedicated word count being taken up by a separate scene gives me a lot more wiggle room to play with because I no longer feel any need to pad out a scene for extra word count — the story ideas can progress at their own pace as normal because I have effectively a second, smaller release that shaves off a bit of the required word count every week.

It’s still going to be the same amount of work each week. No matter which way you slice it, it’s going to be a time of buckling down, digging my heels in, and getting it done. The word count doesn’t go down at all by me doing a supplemental file, it just breaks up the needed word count per release into a more manageable chunk each week, allowing each discussed idea to be better explored in its own time.

Acting

Now that I understand the amount of work involved in my goals and have a partial plan of action, it all comes down to committing to the work. I’m the type of person that has to hold very religiously to my deadlines because it only takes one time of dropping the ball to completely disrupt my rhythm.

I’m not technically committing to a Wednesday release every week until December, but I am formally committing to both the deadline I have set and the goal I have set for myself. However I can/will do that is up to debate, but the goal is non negotiable.

This is going to be a big project, but I can’t wait to see it through to this season’s end. If you need more advice about consistency and discipline, how about checking out my article about it? Link here!

For now though, that’s all for me. I’ve got a lot to do, and there’s no time to waste getting it done. Thank you all for your time!