End Of August

Back at the one-third mark of August, I did a writing update. I had been kicking butt on my goal of 500 words a day in August so far. Not missing the mark on any of those first ten days. For some reason, I was motivated to make a lofty goal. 

500 words a day, when multiplied out to 31 days, would net me 15,500 words on the month. I knew I would likely be a lot closer to 20,000 because of the fact that I always  wrote extra words. It was basically impossible to hit right on the mark of 500 a day, I always went over by 50 words or 100 words or more, sometimes.

I decided that it would be cool to shoot for the goal of 25,000 instead of just the 20,000 I would likely reach. Of course, that changed things a little. At the time, it meant that I needed to hit an average of 876 words per day from there on out to make it to my new goal. 500 words a day was out. I'd only let myself stay at that mark for ten days...like a dummy.

By the time I did my next update, I had a good idea of how well I was doing.

I wasn't over 876 words per day for all of them, but I was over 1,000 hours on some days, and I hoped that was enough to make up for it. I kept plugging away, but days like the 16th, where I only got 506 words per day were dragging me down.

As the month's end came closer and closer, it got more and more dire. 876 per day changed. I'd let my production slide enough that now I needed more like 925 per day to make the goal. I despaired that I was not going to make it. 

Then the final days of the month arrived, and the whole 500 words a day thing was gone. If I wanted to hit my goal, I had to be writing 1,000 a day. On top of that, the end of the month was really busy, and I didn't think I was going to be able to keep it up. I prepared myself to write a report at the end of the month talking about how I'd fallen short.

The last few days, I still didn't hit 1,000 a day. I was out of luck. When I got home at 11:30 PM on the final day of August, I was about 800 words shy of 25,000. I was about to go to bed, but before I did, I thought I could sit down and write this post about missing my goal by a hair. If August was only one of those months with 32 days in it, then I would have made it.

I clicked the NEW POST button, and then thought, "Why would I write the post, instead of just writing the rest of the words that I'm short? I could hit my goal instead, couldn't I?"

I wavered for a little while, trying to decide what to do. I didn't want to stay up late, because the next morning was the one day of the month that I got to weigh myself, and I wanted it to be as good as possible. Getting a good night's sleep the night before would make it more likely that the numbers on the scale would be more pleasing.

But then I finally went for it. I opened up Google Docs and started writing. It flowed pretty well for me, and it wasn't long before I was only 400 words short instead of 800. I kept checking my word count as I pushed forward. Soon it was 300, then 250, then 100.

Then, I was done. I wrote 1,748 words on the 31st, and finished the month at 25,012 words! Boom baby! Nailed it.

25012 / 25000 (100.05%)

It felt really good to succeed, especially succeeding at something that I was sure was out of reach. Achievement is always a positive, I think.

Here's my chart for the month.

Where does that put me on my overall goal for the year? My overall goal is to beat 2019-20 success of 300,000 in one year. So, the overall goal for the year is 304,475. Where am I at now? 

I'm over 40,000 for the year. I've written 42,552 words in the first two months. 

42552 / 304475 (13.98%)

So, I'm 13.98% of the way through my goal. That's not sufficient to reach my goal for the year. If I stayed at this pace, I'd only make it to 255,312. That's not a bad total for a year, but that's not what I'm shooting for. I'm shooting for more than that. 

So, it's time to step it up. Which, of course was what I'd had planned all along. This month is when I up my daily goal to 1,000 words. No more of this 500 a day thing. That means that this month I should step up from 25,000 words to at least 30,000. 

For now, I'm going to just stick with 30,000 as my target. I'm not going to make it 35,000 or something. Going to 1,000 a day is enough this time. Maybe next month I'll push it past the simple 1,000 a day and shoot for the moon.

So, on with September! On top of the writing goals, I'm going to get my eBook of my Christmas story collection published, and I'm going to continue with my daily videos of Marshal and me eating the Beef, Butter, Bacon, and Eggs Challenge. So, it's going to be another big month. Here we go!