Status Report: Week One

I used to spend my Sunday evenings on the net watching NFL box scores tick-over and calculating the affects on my fantasy teams in my head. Now, I suspect I’ll be spending my Sunday evenings doing wordcount update posts like this one. (What a life, eh?)

So, how did I go over my first (six-day) week in the Year of a Million Words?

Wordcount: 21,432 words

Average: 3,572 words per day (exceeds 2732 benchmark)

Most productive day: Thursday 3 Jan, 4,875 words

Least productive day: Tuesday 1 Jan (understandably), 1830 words

[If anyone knows of a handy online utilty to make nicer looking graphs than these, please let me know.]

‘Other’ consists of person-to-person emails, Zoetrope reviews, and I guess poetry (if I’d written any. I’ve being careful to carve out as much detail as I can in my trust Excel spreadsheet because I’m already thinking it’s dodgy to include any person-to-person writing. The word count should be words written for mass consumption. That’s how I feel right now, but I think I’ll sleep on it before doing anything drastic like making the task harder for me.

How’d I do it?

Well, I haven’t been working this week, so time hasn’t really been an issue. And I’m going to Madrid next weekend so I’ve been trying to write enough to cover these non-writing days. So, I’m in good shape, but the real test was always going to be how I cope with writing and working a 40-hour week.

I think the secret will be to have a lot on the go at once. Just this week I’ve worked on a novel, four different short stories, a children’s picture book, and book and music related musings which wound up on this blog.

I’ll burn out about forty times this year, but hopefully I’ll keep getting back on the horse or horse-like creature.

Flash fiction = Shetland Pony.

Short story = Thoroughbred Racehorse.

Novel = Clydesdale… maybe a team of them.

Blog Entry = Donkey.