The First Quarter in Statistics:
Words Written: ~29,000
Pieces of WIP: Short, Novella, Planes Shifter, Resilience.
Days written: 48/90
Days I Wrote the Most: Saturdays and Mondays.
Learning
From this first quarter, I’ve been almost learning how to track things.
To be honest, I didn’t expect to need to learn how to add up some numbers and write them down, but it seems to be complicated when you’re re-writing – including things I wrote a year ago.
The main thing that told me I’ve struggle with word-count tracking was February.
February
This was the month that I read Planes Shifter (PS), wrote Resilience, added to a novella and then at the end, began changing PS. I got soooo lost.
I wrote the February goals update citing a total of around 6,000 words written, based on word changes (i.e. how much increased the manuscript word-count went up) and yet I only managed to write down which days and the total accounting for 3,458 words… Then I recalculated the total from my raw scores and got 4,601 words.
And since I’m also trying to look at which days I write the most and any patterns in how the flow of my bigger word-counts occur, I didn’t want to put an arbitrary figure in the spreadsheet.
Thus, in all following posts, I’m going to refer to February as 4,601 words.
Goals
Having done three months of tracking, I’ve tweaked my insane “250,000 words this year” to 150,000 words; which if I can make it, I feel would still be a great achievement.
This comes down to 12,500 words a month, which I’ve added to my spreadsheet as a goal total.
Of course, I’m now already behind, having taken 20 days to read through my draft and not write anything.
First Quarter: 27,859 / 37,500 words
So I’m a bit behind… Darn.
Tracking Spreadsheets
So this is the spreadsheet I’ve been using:
And this is where I’ve made a note of which project I was adding to that day:
And then, as of April, this will be my new spreadsheet, which I’m still tweaking (found here, by the way):
So here’s to the next quarter; where hopefully I’ll complete the re-write and catch up with my word count.
Goal for Quarter 2: 37,500
Goal to First Half of Year: 75,000
Words Remaining: 47,141