Tag: Progress posts

315 words.

I was sick. Although I didn’t really start to feel sick until last night so that excuse doesn’t really fly. Except maybe my body knew I was getting sick and was too busy trying to fight it off to save any energy for writing.

Hey, it’s a better excuse than the truth. I just didn’t ever feel like writing yesterday, and then I got sick.

On the other hand, I’m more sick today than yesterday and I’ve already beat yesterday’s word count by double.

Daily average since 9/19: 1,022 words.

1,977 words.

Huh?

It just wasn’t a great writing day. I can’t really explain it better than that.

Daily average since 9/19: 1,019 words.

I’m going to get to 2,000. Just don’t know how long it will take me.

3,073 words.

Tried something new. It seemed to work. :)

Daily average since 9/19: 1,003 words.

Yay! I’m above 1,ooo again.

1,054 words.

Daily average since 9/19: 969 words.

Remember this scale?

1,000 = low word count day
2,000 = average word count day
3,000 = moderate word count day
4,000 = high word count day
5,000 = record breaking word count day (always, because 5k is huge!)

I’m still trying to get into a routine with writing where I’m reaching the average and moderate word count levels more often than I have low word count days.

Clearly, I’m not there yet.

1,846 words.

I have no excuse that makes sense for why I wasn’t able to get two of my four sessions done yesterday. Also, the two I did finish did not total 2,000 words.

The schedule was 8–9:30, 10–11:30, 12:30–2, 2:30–4, or four 1.5 hour sessions. I got behind early and never caught up. In fact, I kept getting further and further behind, until I finished the second session at almost 8:30 last night. (Today appears to be headed in an even worse direction. Here’s hoping I can pull myself out of this spiral.)

Daily average since 9/19: 967 words.

224 words.

So disappointing, considering my goal yesterday.

Daily average since 9/19: 952 words.

I spent last night figuring out just what I would need to do to finish the book I’m working on in the time I have left, realized it was a fool’s dream considering my actual track record, and came up with a new plan, something that still pushes me to do better than I have before, but something that’s not so far outside the realm of possibility.

So I have a new plan for this book. One I feel pretty good about it. I’ll detail it in a post of it’s own, because this is a word count post, not a goal post. ;)

3,113 words.

Daily average since 9/19: 965 words.

I’m 57,002 words down from 9/19 and a 2,000 word average. That sounds pretty bad, but doing the numbers made me realize I can recover from this in less than 90 days with just an additional 635 words a day. So although I’m not making the catch up for words a priority, it is nice to know it’s not some insurmountable goal. And it’s reachable with no change in plan at all, because my plan is to have more average and moderate word days than not and monitor my average to see how well I’m doing. As long as I don’t reset my start date (9/19, which I’m not planning to do), a 2,000 word average will mean I’ve recovered.

1,178 words.

As you might note, I did not succeed in my effort to finally write 6,000 words in a day.

Daily average since 9/19: 927 words.

Nov. 10: 2,369
Nov. 11: 2,612

Daily average since 9/19: 922 words.

The average is going up again! Finally.

On these days, I had two false starts on my attempt to write 6,000 words in a day, but today I plan to try that again. Interruptions, distractions, and my own inability to get past those things severely affected the time I spent writing, while my inability to stop tinkering with my words kept my pace too slow and stopped me from gaining any momentum.

Nov. 7: 0
Nov. 8: 326
Nov. 9: 548

Daily average since 9/19: 863 words.

Still not willing to move the start date for this. I’ll just have to keep working on getting it up to 2,000, and if I ever manage that, I’ll do my best to keep it there!

Nov. 1–6: 0 words.

They’re all zeros.

Daily average since 9/19 (as of Nov. 6): 897 words.

Oct. 31: 1,478

It was supposed to be a lot more than that. :(

Daily average since 9/19: 1,019 words.

I am now 3,202 words behind on my current book. And I need to write 4,680 words today. Things are not looking good for this next personal deadline I’ve set. :o

Oct. 29: 0
Oct. 30: 0

Daily average since 9/19: 1,009 words

Oct. 27: 109
Oct. 28: 0

Expected the low counts. In fact, the 109 is the net changes from an edit.

Daily average since 9/19: 1,058 words

I should be writing today, but I’ve been skipping around online most of the day and I’m just about too tired to care. :)

Now, on to a post about the experiment I mentioned a few posts back.

Oct. 23: 3,095
Oct. 24: 218
Oct. 25: 1,982
Oct. 26: 2,281

Daily average since 9/19 (as of Oct. 26): 1,109 words

It’s still trending up. That’s excellent news. I really believe I’m eventually going to get there. 2,000 is a very reasonable number.

I also checked my zero word count days average for every month since I started recording my numbers (it wasn’t as hard as you might think, since I already have a formula in my spreadsheet that already tells me how many I have each month).

My average is 10 zero word days a month.

Of course, that is just an average, but it does give me somewhere to start if I want to reach 2,000 words a day on average over the course of a month. If I write 3,000 words on average every day that I write, and I still maintain the 10 days a month average on zero word days, I’ll end up with about a 2,000 a day average in the long run.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that yet, but it’s definitely something I’m going to think about. :)

Oct. 21: 3,411
Oct. 22: 0

That zero word day is going to haunt me.

Daily average since 9/19: 1,020 words

Yay! I’m finally over the 1,000 words mark. :D

Oct. 19: 1,162
Oct. 20: 2,906

Considering the number of words I was trying to write on those two days (6,000), I’d say those are pretty grim numbers.

On the other hand, it’s a 2,000 words a day average, so yay?

Daily average since 9/19: 978 words.

I’ve improved. It’s been a month now, and I’m up to 978 words a day, which is actually fantastic compared to my average for the month before (which was 15 words a day, not kidding).

Since I’m not going to move my start day for this average, it’s going to take me a long time to get it up to 2,000 at this point. According to my spreadsheet, I need 31,722 words above 2,000 a day to catch up.

Oct. 16: 612
Oct. 17: 1,299
Oct. 18: 4,013

I picked up some steam yesterday (the 18th), but I haven’t had much follow on success today.

Also, yesterday I was actually trying to hit 6,000 words, so that was a bit of a fail. I’m not crying over it or anything, though. Writing 4,013 words in a day is a good day for me.

Daily average since 9/19: 910 words.

104 words.

That’s not a typo.

Daily average since 9/19: 796 words.

Believe it or not, 796 is still an improvement over my all-time daily average. Getting this number up to 2,000 is turning into a real chore! (Not that I didn’t suspect it would be.)