I’ve decided that keeping a post as a running commentary on the month’s writing might be the best way to actually have some accountability to my goals.
A month is a long time, coming in at 1/12 of a year. Daily posts could work, but every post requires me to say something when all I might want to say is that it’s going well or not going so well at all. So here is April.
| Day | Words | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1–11 | 3,309 | Lump sum total because I didn’t start this until 4/12. Going forward, most days will have their own row. |
| 12 | 1,178 | I was happy to make some real progress with my word count today, but I stayed up far too late just because I wanted to get past the 1,000 word mark. |
| 13 | -5 | Today doesn’t look promising to keep my 1k streak alive, but I’ll try. |
| 14 | 420 | Didn’t get to spend much time on writing, but I’m happy with what I did. Also, did some publishing work. :) |
| 15 | 0 | Personal work. Taxes. Ugh. |
| 16 | 0 | Publishing work. |
| 17 | 90 | |
| 18–21 | 0 | Publishing work. |
| 22 | -8 | Took a break. Made a few corrections in a manuscript anyway and ended up with a net negative for the day. |
| 23 | 0 | Break. |
| 24 | 381 | Break. Started a new story at the end of the day anyway. |
| 25 | 0 | Personal matters. An emotionally draining day, to be honest. I had no energy left at the end of the day for writing. Tomorrow should be considerably more productive. |
| 26–27 | 0 | I should have updated daily instead of coming back to post this at the end of the month, because I can’t remember what it was that I let get in the way of writing new words on these days. Clearly there was something. Note to self for future accountability posts: update daily instead of sporadically. :) |
| 28 | 374 | Continued the new story. |
| 29 | 864 | Continued the new story. |
| 30 | 156 | Continued the new story. It really wasn’t supposed to be this long. I’m also not sure I want to spend more time on it right now, because I have a novel I want to finish asap. |
I’ll change the post date every time I update this so it stays current in the flow of the timeline of posts, so don’t be surprised to see it pop up again (and again).
Also, this theme makes table-making pretty doggone easy! I like it. :D
Summary
April didn’t go as well as I wanted it to, but I can see from my word count spreadsheet (screenshot below) and the table above that I am still doing a lot better than this time last year.
I’m less than ten thousand words away from beating both 2021 and 2022 in output, and I still feel motivated and inspired to continue. (The only reason November 2021 was a 19k month was because I added back the 11k words I took out in May 2020, so the numbers are even worse than they look for 2021.)
For the last couple of years, writing has pretty much felt like a hard push every time I tried to get going again.
Now, I’m gliding right along. :)
I feel like April might have been better if the month hadn’t just turned out to be particularly full of things I didn’t expect to take up so much time: taxes, personal matters (probate issues, estate issues), publishing for the first time in a while and forgetting how time consuming it can be to get all those related things done.
I liked this format for accountability, but I think I prefer individual posts after all. I tend to want to ramble and I kind of miss having the space for that. So May’s post might revert back to individual daily posts so I can see how that will go. :) Or maybe I’ll make a master post and link to the daily posts in it, if it doesn’t turn out to be too much work.
Onward to May now! New post coming up. :D