A Full Month In The Can

A few weeks ago, I announced to the world...or at least the few members of the world who come to this blog and read my stuff...that I was going to make a big push to write every day, and I made a goal to write 300,000 words in my 46th year of life here on God's green earth.

If you read that announcement, and were suspicious that I had already given up because of the fact that I have been completely silent about it since then, this post can put your worries to rest. I'm touched at how worried you were, really, but it turns out that I wasn't pulling my usual routine of promising big and then fading into the bushes a la Homer Simpson.

No, in fact, I wrote a lot this month. I didn't do any NaNoWriMo level work or anything like that, but I got a good start. In the 30 days that make up November, I managed to get some writing in on 23 of those days.

Of course, that means that I scored a zero words on seven days in November, which isn't great, but it was almost never through actual laziness on my part. Most of the no-word days came on the weekend, when I was doing things different from my usual routine. I've been taking time during my lunch break at work to write, but when I don't go to work, I seem pretty inclined to forget. One of those days was also Thanksgving...not because I felt like I deserved a holiday from writing, but again because I wasn't at work and didn't have a lunch break.

Here's my report card from November:

So, my total for the month was 11,545 words. All of those words were written on Book 2 of the Sunny & Gray saga. I mentioned in that last post that I had already started writing starting the day after my birthday, and did a few thousand words in October. So, here's my year to date report card:

Altogether so far, I'm just under 15,000 words. So, here's my picometer so far:

EDIT:
New progress meter.

14949 / 300000 (4.98%)

Four percent is not that amazing of an output, but I'm not very discouraged at all. It was a pretty good start. I wanted to use November as a month to get the ball rolling, start developing habits, that kind of thing. December is going to be even better.

How so, you ask? Well thanks for asking. Let me tell you. My goal for December is to hit 500 words every single day. In November, I missed writing seven days out of thirty, but I am more concerned about those seven days when I wrote, but didn't even manage to get over 400 words. Those were the days that I actually was being lazy. I was letting my whininess win. I didn't really feel like writing, so I did the bare minimum to say that I did. I'll never make 300,000 if I keep doing that.

So, now I'm not allowed to say that I did the bare minimum unless I've made it over 500 words. That's the least I can do, as the saying goes. I started with it yesterday, the first. I wrote 640 words. If I hadn't put the minimum allowance on there, I would have quit at 350, because that's where I was when I started to feel like I should quit. 350 words is just not enough. A lot of writing is getting into the flow of it, but you can't really get into the flow if you're just phoning it in.

So, it's 500 words a day in December, and then, come January, I'll probably up it to 1,000. But let's see how I manage December before I go talking about that.

My words this month will be split between Sunny & Gray and a new Christmas story based on the premise that one of our podcast listeners suggested. I think tonight Rish and I will look through our options, and decide on the winner, then I'll put on my thinking cap, and see what I can come up with. My story from last year, The Christmas Creature, was about 15,000 words long, so we'll see what happens this time.

Oh, and you can look forward to The Christmas Creature hitting the podcast later this month. I hope you like it.