Day Three

First non-weekend day doing the writing thing, and I did just fine again. I had my words written early in the day, which is the best way to go, if you ask me. It's that motivational thing about eating a frog. Supposedly, Mark Twain once said that if you have to eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. If you save it for later, you'll hear that thing croaking in your mind all day until you do. I guess get the hard things done first.

Not that writing is the hard thing, but it is the important thing. I could miss out on other things and it wouldn't matter, but my goal for the next 32 days is to write every single day, so it is important if I miss it. Therefore, the earlier I get it done, the better--the more likely that I do it and don't forget it accidentally.

So, today I wrote 572 words on my story called "Karma Is My Boyfriend." That puts me at 1,651 words for the month...also for the year. That leaves me still slightly over 300,000 words to go to beat my goal.

Oh, I suppose I probably ought to explain why my goal is 304,475 for the year. Rish called me up today an asked me why, after seeing that chart on my other posts. It's a pretty random-seeming number. Well, allow me to post another chart that I made back in 2019-2020:

That is my total from 2020. I got 304,474 for the whole year. It's the highest word total that I ever got in a year. I had the same goal last year, but I failed to achieve it. I only got this:

Because I only made through half of the year. I certainly would have achieved it if I'd stuck with it, but I let a family tragedy throw me off my game, ad quit instead. So, I'm still chasing that. My goal is one word more than 2020. 

Now, I'm pretty certain that I will easily best that. I will probably get thousands of words more than that. In fact, back in 2020 I achieved that number by early September. I didn't write for the whole final two months of the year. I skipped 52 days that I could have written. 52 days times 1,000 words a day means 52,000 words. I could have had that many more. So, I expect that I will achieve that this time around, but I won't make that my goal this time. This time, I just have to beat last time.

I'm well on my way, though. I've hit 500 words every day so far. That's a great start, especially considering that my 500 words a day goal isn't supposed to start until December. Maybe I can move the timeline up. I'll see if I can't hit 500 words a day all of October/November, and if I do, I'll make December the start of 1,000 words a day. That sounds like a worthwhile stretch goal.