One Million Word Update

Back in November for the start of Nanowrimo, the Sheffield Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s group challenged themselves to see how quickly as a group, we could write one million words, with the aim to complete this goal by November 2016 and the next Nanowrimo. At the end of December the running total stood at 188,331 words.

This month has seen word count totals of Chris – 18,037 words; David – 2,445 words; Jo – 600 words; Kathryn – 26,712 words; Steve P – 500 words and Tom – 6,000 words.

That makes a month’s total of 54,294 words and a cumulative total of 242,625 word.

So there is just 757,375 words more to write.

Monitoring Your Writing

So I spent the last year monitoring my writing, carefully recording each day, the number of words I had written and what I had written it on. Now, I did this for a number of reasons. The first one was mainly to track my word count for the year. The second was to keep myself accountable – and that worked I only missed writing 18 days all of last year. The third reason and what I am planning to focus this blog post on was to monitor my writing.

Writing down my writing meant that I was able to go back, evaluate when I write best and what type of writing is timed at different times in the week. See the table below.

Day	Total	Average
Monday	42426	848.52
Tuesday	46492	948.82
Wednesday	25975	530.10
Thursday	40335	806.70
Friday	36601	732.02
Saturday	61011	1220.22
Sunday	82640	1652.80
	335480	962.74

So looking at this table –

You can straight away see that Wednesday is my worst writing day. This is most likely due to the fact that it is the middle of the working week, and to a certain extent feeling tired has an impact. Also by Wednesday, I have usually been ahead of my word count goal for the week with my efforts not to fall behind on Monday or Tuesday, so I felt that it was okay (for lack of a better term) to slack off with my writing a bit.

Another lower word count day was Friday and that was almost to be expected. Friday night were made for chilling quite simply put and writing does not always fit with chilling.

The final thing of note, Sunday also out preformed Saturday’s word count. I put this down to the football factor and not writing while I am listening to the football, which takes away a lot of time on a Saturday.

The important thing with understand the table and the day’s output (which I have briefly explained above), I have been able to use it to inform my targets for this year’s word count.  Namely, I have upped my work evening word count goals to 600 word, which given last year’s average, I hit everyday but Wednesday; keep my Saturday goal at 1000 words and up my Sunday goal to 1500. And since I know I was above the average last year for these goals, I have no fear in doing this.

In terms of what I wrote on days, I found that I was better off when I started a new chapter on a weekend and added details to that chapter on week nights or did editing. I guess this is also down to work fatigue getting in the way of new ideas.

For those that are interested, I also monitored my monthly word counts – see table below and found that while I struggled to write the nanowrimo goal on all but one month, I was perfectly capable of writing over 25,000 each month that adds up to a hell of a lot more than just doing nanowrimo for one month a year.

	Words Estimated	Words Written	Words Over/Under	Word Average Per Day	Word Average Per Week	Writing Days
Janurary	20500	22123	1623	713.65	4916.22	31
February	18000	21740	3740	776.43	5435.00	28
March	20000	25223	5223	813.65	5605.11	31
April	19000	27533	8533	917.77	6403.02	30
May	50000	53355	3355	1721.13	11856.67	31
June	22500	39616	17116	1320.53	9213.02	30
July	19500	25105	5605	809.84	5578.89	31
August	20500	20759	259	669.65	4613.11	28
September	21000	22964	1964	765.47	5340.47	27
October	20000	26979	6979	870.29	5995.33	31
November	50000	39070	-10930	1302.33	9086.05	30
December	20500	11013	-9487	355.26	2447.33	19
	301500	335480	33980	919.67	6374.19	347

And guess all that needs saying to finish this post, is that I encourage you all to monitor your words and revaluate them as for me it has given me my most productive writing year, ever!

One Million Words Target – 144688 Words So Far

So as a Writers, we decided to set ourselves the target of getting to a million words within a year (or as fast as we can get there.) We started recording our individual word count on the 1^st November to coincide with the start of Nanowrimo.

So without any further ado, our total word count as a group for November was 144688 words.

That was made up of word counts from Chris of 21917, David of 3554, Jo of 2378, Kathryn of 39070, Matthew of 72529 and Steve P of 5240.

Obviously as this is month one of the challenge, there are no other totals to add to that word count. Therefore the cumulative total stands at 144688 words and we have just the 855312 more to write.

Continuing with Nanowrimo when you fall behind

So as expected this week, I fell behind with nanowrimo. In fact earlier this week when I found myself 7545 word behind where I should be and posted the phrase on my facebook status that nanowrimo was kicking my ass. But thinking about it that phrase wasn’t completely true, what was slowly down my word count was work getting in the way, the fact that the days were busy and sucking my creative energy and the fact that at the weekend, I had a lot of work related jobs to do instead of working on the book which were completely unavoidable.

 

Now the easiest thing to do at this point would be to give up. But I had a writing run to keep going and no matter how slowly the word count was growing. Writing 112 words is not a lot, and its 1555 words below the nanowrimo daily target but trust me it is better than no words. The important thing was that no matter how busy I was the words were going down and I know that my evening are due to free up a bit more in the next week.

So I guess what this short post is saying, is that no matter how hard it gets, some words are better than none. And that’s it for now as I’m cutting things short tonight as I have a chapter to finish and another 1420 to write.