Sunday, January 7, 2024

One Week In January

Okay, it's time for another update. How did January go so far? It's been a whole week, am I keeping up with my goals for the month?

Well, I guess to start with, I should probably revisit my goals. In my last post, I gave you the final tally for the month of December, which happened to be a record total in a month for me. I pushed hard at the end of the month to come out with 38,046 words for the month. 

Then I looked at my average and noticed that it was 1227.3 words per day. So, if I upped my daily goal from 1,000 a day to 1,250 a day, then I would achieve an all new record total in January. So, my new goal was to hit 1,250 per day. Did I manage that? Well, feast your eyes:

Boom baby! That's right I nailed it...almost every day. I accidentally blew it on Thursday. I wrote my 1,000 words, but when I checked I saw that I wasn't quite to 1,250. So, I went to finish up with another 110 words. Just as I tried to do that, someone came over to talk with me, so I had to set the writing aside for a minute. Well, by the time he left, I had forgotten that I hadn't finished writing, so I never went back for those last few words.

Oh well, it didn't really matter, because I overwrote by at least 110 words on several other days during the week, so I'm still way over the average of 1,250, and I'm cruising toward that record month. How am I doing, well, let's check my meter.

9446 / 38047 (24.83%)

So, I'm 24.83% of the way there, after 22.58% of the month has passed. So, I'm doing fine. Not running away with it or anything, but I'm doing pretty good.

Here's how the full year chart looks:


That's only October, November, and December, but the number in the total is correct. I didn't add January to the year-to-date chart because then it wouldn't fit on the blog page. It's right above, so you can see it there. So, I'm at 74,405. What's that according to my meter?

74405 / 304475 (24.44%)

Looks like right now I'm in the exact same place for the month as I am for the year. 24% of the way there. Although I'm in an even better place for the year goal, because we're only 19.67% of the way through the year, so I'm getting well ahead. I'm going to trounce that goal.

The other cool thing that you can see in the year-to-date charts is the average words per day for each month. So far, in January, I am at 1349 per day. That's nearly 100 more than I made as my goal, so that's pretty good. If you multiply that average by 31 days, then my total for the month will end up at 41,819. That's a big time number. I hope I can keep it up and hit that number. That would be awesome.

As far as the book goes, "Caught Up in Christmas" is at 67,325 words. As Rish Outfield would say, "67,000! We could buy our own ship for that much." The book is getting really close to finished. It might be finished already if I hadn't come up with one last obstacle for our heroine to have to defeat before the book ends, just one more plot twist before the big finale, and I'm wrapping that plot twist up now. So, I may well be done with the book by next week.

That's pretty exciting...but also a little terrifying. What will I write next? I'm not certain, but I think I will jump into my book that I was planning to write last year called "Skeleton Crew". It a book about soldiers for hire who get a job protecting a senator's daughter from a Mexican drug cartel, but they all get killed. That's how the story begins. Then it goes on from there.

The problem is, I'm not sure how it goes on from there. I haven't worked out the story. I don't have an outline. So, I'm going to have to get going on it this week if I want to start writing the story next week. I have a lot of detail for the story in my mind, but I haven't sat down and planned it all out. I will have to work on that. The way I like to do it is put my phone onto dictation mode, and then talk it out while I drive to and from work. That's an hour and a half a day, so I should be able to get a lot of work done if I stick to that. That's almost eight hours in a week. I got this, right?

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