After a Month

At the beginning of August I said I was going to try writing 410 words every day for 4 months as my own personal NaNoWrMo, so at the end of August I thought I’d give an update on how I’m doing so far.

Before I began I worked out the word count for every day (the beauty of excel) and set up a spreadsheet with my expected word count, my actual word count, how many words I actually wrote and what my deficit is.

I’ve found this a great motivator for when I’m struggling.  I hate to see a 0 in the ‘what I wrote that day’ column.  It is also pretty horrible to see the deficit numbers climbing.

I’m not managing to write every day, but when I do it is quite often over 400 words which is good.  And by only having to write such a small number every day it gives me time to think about what comes next.  This really is an exercise in getting words down, rather than writing a best selling novel.  I can go back and make it good later, for now I’m just writing.  No editing allowed.  Which means anything in my head goes on the page.  I’ve even got my token Ninja in.  So now I just have to keep the momentum going to hit 50000 by end of November.