***UPDATE 8/1***
Donations close today, so I thought I'd do a final wrap-up of my progress and word counts.
July 21: - 500 (yes, you read that right. Yes, I did completely miss the point on Monday and do a bit of revising)
July 22: 1190
July 23: 1360
Which brought my WAT Total to 18670 - yay, met the goal. I did what any other unreasonable person would do, set a stretch goal!!! Wonder if I can make it to 20,000?
July 24: 0
July 25: 250
July26: 1,300
And I did it! Final WAT Total: 20220
Thank you to everyone who supported me not only meeting, but exceeding my writing goals this summer. Now I'm going to take a nap.
***Update 7/21***
As a parent and writer with a full time day job, I've learned it's totally unrealistic for me to write everyday. So why set a daily writing goal? It might be counterintuitive, but I think it's good to fail once in a while. If I can figure out the 'why' without judgement, I can build resilience and understand my process better.
So, on my failure days, I spend a little time thinking about what went on that day. More often than not it's unavoidable things: I needed sleep (or reading, or conversation with a friend time) more than writing; had family time (very important); or lots of work stuff happening (also, very important). Sometimes I lose time to doomscrolling. But I also realized that even on non-word count days I am often thinking about stories, or talking about them.
Most importantly, it's the resilience piece. At this stage in my life, not hitting a 1k daily word count goal is a low risk failure. The ability to sit down two days later and writing anyway, without criticism or judgement builds the resilience muscle.
For me it works. YMMV, of course! As always take what resonates and leave the rest.
Here's my week breakdown:
July 12: 450
July 13: 2,100
July 14: 0
July 15: 0
July 16: 1800
July 17: 0
July 18: 3,800
July 19: 4,200
July 20: 4,700
What happened on the 0 days? Work. And sleep. On the 17th I was feeling stuck on a story problem and went for a walk with a writer friend. We didn't solve the problem (mostly because we got started talking about KPDH and dating), but the conversation got me thinking and helped me reach a solution.
Then I had Very Good Writing Weekend. Which officially brings my WAT total to...*mathing*: 17,050
And since I've reached my overall goal, I'm going to stretch with the hopes of reaching 20k by the end of the WAT.
Thanks to everyone who's sponsored me so far, you're amazing and I'm so grateful.
***Update 6/18****
I know I'm jumping the gun on starting before the WAT officially begins, but I had the opportunity to jump in on some writing sessions with our Novel Writing Workshop crew in the last two weeks and decided not to wait. I'll keep adding words written to my starting total!
Counting this morning's session, I'm up to 21k. I attended the six week workshop back in 2005 and am now the program director. I've seen a lot of changes over the years, but at the core, Clarion West remains committed to providing world class writing education focused on speculative fiction writers--in person or online. I'm thrilled to be raising money to help support an organization I'm proud to be part of - logging some major wordcount on my romantasy novel The Spider and the Snake (I know, very not very sexy! but hey, the title is a WIP!)
I'm 15k words in and I'm hoping to complete another 15k during the write-a-thon. That's just over 1,000 words a day. Wish me luck!
***Update 6/18****
I know I'm jumping the gun on starting before the WAT officially begins, but I had the opportunity to jump in on some writing sessions with our Novel Writing Workshop crew in the last two weeks and decided not to wait. I'll keep adding words written to my starting total!
Counting this morning's session, I'm up to 21k.
