Finishing Out November

I wrote 1,284 words for the final day of November. My first full month has come to an end.

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I smashed all the goals that I set for myself for the month. The first goal was to write every day. I was achieving that easily, so I upped the goal to 500 words per day, and I nailed that one too. I gave myself the total word count goal for the month of 15,000, and had that crushed by the 21st. So I upped the goal to 20,000 and passed that up by the 26th. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you just put your mind to it and work at it every day.

24541 / 20000 (122.70%)

I finished with 122.7% of my goal. Pretty cool.

I had one other goal, and that was to get my average words per day above 750...you know, as a kind of a step up from 500 toward 1,000 which is my goal starting tomorrow.

And there you have it, final average of 818. That's a big jump up from the four days I wrote in October which garnered me an average of 593. So, where does that leave me on my quest for the largest word count I've ever managed in a single year...or at least 304,475 words?

26913 / 304475 (8.84%)

Not very far along. We are 9.29% of the way through the year, and I'm only at 8.84%. That's going to change in a hurry now, though. Starting tomorrow I can't quit until I've reached a thousand words. Which means my monthly total will reach at least 30,000...31,000 actually, since there's 31 days in December. 

If I do the math, then I have to write 832 words a day to beat my year goal of 304,475. I almost averaged that this month, when I was only required to write 500 words a day. For the rest of the year I will be required to write at least 168 words above that average, meaning that barring some serious debilitation, I should easily make it. I just have to keep to the program.

Of course, I am tempted to take it even further. I mentioned in previous blog posts that I read a book about writing even more and faster called 5,000 Words Per Hour.

Some month here soon, depending on how the next few go, I may reread that book and employ the stuff he talks about in there to see if I can't up my output. There's a lot of tricks I want to try. For example, dictating my story into my phone when I'm driving to and from work in addition to my daily sit down writing session would massively increase my word count. There may come a day when I up my goal to 1,500 words a day or even 2,000. We shall see. I want to keep pushing myself.

However, I will no longer be writing these daily word count blog posts. It's just too much. It's time to pull back a little bit. For example, this post is over 500 words and took me twenty minutes or more to write. Imagine if I didn't use my time here, but rather on my book. What more could I accomplish with that?

So, the writing post will now cut back to a simple once a week thing. I guess I'll do them every Friday since that will be seven days from this post. I'll see you all then.