Tuesday, May 18, 2010

In which I am a wee bit shamed

Last week I posted about word counts, and the comments really surprised me. Mainly because I was like "look, Ma, I did a cartwheel!" and you guys were like "look, I did a backflip into a somersault and ended with a triple lutz without ice skates."

To which I say: woah. Your word counts were off the charts! They shamed my word count output into the dunce corner. The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous my behavior seemed. Here was I, saying that I wanted to make this my profession, and I would let entire days go by without doing any work. Nothing. No new words, no revising of old words, nothing. 50K words had taken me 2+ months and I still didn't know when I was going to make it to 80K words (my target word count for the current WIP).

Was I discouraged? Oh, sure. Did I use that discouragement to set some goals/rules for myself? Oh you know it. So I'm keeping myself honest to you lot.

Goal: Finish current WIP at ~80K words by the end of May
Current word count: 52K as of last night
Pace: 2K words a day until May 31st

You guys are my witnesses to this word count. So far I've slacked off over the weekend and made up for it by writing a whopping 4K words yesterday (go me), but I plan to be a little more consistent about it from now on. Of course this means I won't always have time to post, which bums me out, but I've got lots of good ideas for posts and will be writing them when I can.

If you could wave a pom pom for me, I would really appreciate it.

3 comments:

CATHY CHAPATY said...

Go, JEM, go! (Wildly waving pom poms...) You write whatever you want to write, for however long you want to write. No matter what, you'll still be my favorite word nerdy reality blogger! (Smiling while still waving pom poms....) Yeeeeaaaaa, JEM!

Sherrie Petersen said...

4K in one day? Damn that's impressive!! ((Waving pom poms in both hands)) :D

Lola Sharp said...

Yeah, be careful with putting up real high numbers (over 4,000/day) for more than a couple days...the burn out and mental exhaustion that hits me when I do that makes me not able to even look at it for weeks. I think a healthy goal (if you have a full time day job) is 1,000/day. If you work only part time or not at all ( I know you do work) than 2,000/day is a (pro. level) daily goal.

I'm proud of you. Your honesty, your enthusiasm. I KNOW you can do this. I KNOW you have talent.

Count me in on your cheer squad! Pom pom's are waving.

I left a little love for you on my blog. :)

Happy Weekend!
Love,
Lola