It's been ten days, which is basically one third of a month, though this month has 31 days, so not completely...ten days and eight hours makes a third of the month, but it's almost been that too. Should I wait an hour or so to publish this post to make it a full third...no, sorry, I'll shut up about silly stuff like this. Moving on.
This month is my 500 words a day month. Last month, There were 15 days in which I wrote less than 500 words, many of those days when I basically did the bare minimum to be able to say that I wrote.
It wasn't my goal to write 500 last month, so I could get away with it. I can't get away with that this month.
I've got to write the full 500 every day, and I have to admit that I've been a little lazy so far. Several times, I've checked my word count thinking, "okay, I've got to be close." And then when I am, I just write enough more to get over the hump. I suppose, at this point in the month, I can get away with that, but starting next month I'm ratcheting up to 1,000 words a day, and I should probably get used to what that feels like.
Here's my word counts for the first ten days.
I made it to 1,000 once, and over 700 three more times, but the ones I need to eliminate are the 510, 511, and 512. Those are my bare minimum days, when I could have written more, but I didn't. That's the stuff that needs to be gone by September, or I'll be in for some hard days when that month starts.
All in all, however, I'm doing really well. I've written every single day still, which is a miracle in and of itself. Forty-one days ago, I hadn't written more than a day or two in almost two years. Then, at the drop of a hat, I was able to transition right back to writing every single day without fail like I had been doing in 2019-2020.
Here's my total all added up on the bottom of the chart.
So, my total is sitting at an even 6,600. Which means I've written an average of 660 words a day. That's a respectable amount above my goal. Not amazing or anything, but respectable.
That puts my yearly total at 24,140.
And leaves only 280,335 to go. Almost there folks...almost there. In fact, I'm at 7.93% of my annual goal. I'm freaking racing toward that, eh?
I'm thinking, just to keep myself from getting too depressed at the insurmountable feel of such a lofty goal, I'll make a goal for the month, and work toward that. It's like defeating the lesser boss at the end of the level on your way to King Koopa.
If you don't have small victories on your way tot he large victories, you might become too daunted and give up. So, I'm going to give myself a goal.
500 words times 31 days makes 15,500 words. That's the bare minimum that I should reach...but that's not much of a goal, the bare minimum. If I manage to keep my present average word count of 660 a day, then that should net me 20,460 by the end of the month.
Is that good enough? How's that for a goal? When I started writing this, I was thinking of making my goal 20,000, but that was before I did the math. Now, I feel like I should push myself for something more, instead of just managing to limp along at the same rate that I am going already.
What about 25,000. Then I have to strive a little more to reach it. 25,000 requires at least 807 words per day. I'll have to push to get to that level, but I think it's reachable, and I'd like to be closer to doing 1,000 per day than not for when September arrives, so I'm going to go for it. Shoot for the moon.
My goal for August is 25,000 words. Let's do this, folks! Kick-ass!
Here's my present progress bar in pursuit of that goal.
I'm only at 26.4% of the way there, but we're already 33.33% of the way through the month, so I've really got to kick it up a notch. Let's try some more math...I have 18,400 words left to go, and 21 days to do it. That means I have to average over 876 for the rest of the month. Damn, that might be too lofty.
I guess I'm not just writing 500 words a day anymore. It's got to be 876 a day from here on out, or I'm a rotten egg. Let's see what we can do.
Maybe I need to check out this guy that Abbie Hilton told me about. His name is Chris Fox. He has advice on how to make books that sell. His book Write to Market is the one Abbie recommended. But I noticed that he has another book in the series:
That sounds like a pie in the sky proposition, but maybe it's not. Maybe I need to check that out. If I could write 5,000 words in an hour, it sure wouldn't take very long to get to 300,000 words on the year. It would be only 60 days instead, or 60 hours, actually. You could write a few hours a day, and get there even faster.
He has a YouTube channel as well, and did a video about writing 7,000 words a day.
Hmm...writing a bunch of different sprints seems like a thing a person who doesn't have to work a day job does. Maybe a few years from now I can do that. Although, I bet I could keep pushing myself, and get my word count up far above 1,000 a day before the year is over.
I really need to make better use of some of my down time. I've been meaning for years to turn my commute time into writing time with a dictation app. That ought to be something I really work on for the next little while.
How much more productive could I be if I worked on writing while driving my 1 1/2 hours to and from work? Also, how much more healthy could I be if I went on a walk every day and worked on writing at the same time with the dictation app? It could be pretty great. It's like two great tastes that taste great together. Combine the time of the two necessities. It's not like my brain is 100% occupied with the process of walking. I've pretty much got that walking thing down these days.
Anyway, that's my report for the first third of August. I'm going to step it up, and see if I can't reach 25,000 to finish out this month. Wish me luck, and thanks for reading this to the end. You are the best.
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