While living and working in Edinburgh in 2008 I set out to write one million words in 366 days... but only managed 800,737.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Status Report: Week Forty-Eight

Weeks Forty-Eight – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 16,163 words (compared to 15,561 words last week)
Average: 2309 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Wednesday 26 November, 4,284 words
Least productive day: Friday 28 November, 650 words
Year-to-date: 743,830 words (171,470 words behind target)

There was a spike on Tuesday and Wednesday while Marisa was away for work. I was able to build my evenings around my writing, rather than write around other things. I’m looking forward to the fortnight between finishing work and leaving Edinburgh almost as much as the recommencement of our world tour. Almost.

There are several things I’d like to achieve before 21 December:

* Write my 800,000th word. (Not a million, but it’s something).

* Finish first drafts of two new stories and the expansion of another, hopefully for inclusion in my short story collection. I’m not too worried about the level of polish at this stage, as two of the three stories have scenes set in places I haven’t been yet (Boston; Lima) but will have visited by the time I have to submit the final manuscript (June 09).

* Some sort of Year of Eight Hundred Thousand Words summary blog entry or entries. Lots of graphs, pointless statistics, spelling mistakes: just like the rest of the year. And something about living in Edinburgh: the digested read.

* Submit as many poems and short stories as I can for publication in print and online. I did a similar thing before leaving the Southern Hemisphere in May-June 2007… it seemed to work pretty well. I think my strike rate was 8 publications submitted to: 1 rejection, 6 acceptances, 1 no reply. Having a lot my writing under my belt, I’ll probably (hopefully) be submitting to more than 8 publications this time… we’ll see how my hit-rate goes.

This being the final day of November, and thus the final day of this month’s experiment (write a 100 word story every day), expect some sort of post-mortem tomorrow.

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