An Eclectic Collection of Musings on Life, Living, and Blogging

What Is This?

Following the lead of my mentor, friend, and exemplar, Tami Moore, this is a weekly article to document progress in meeting my writing goals as described here.

I use an Excel spreadsheet to track all my work by category (blog post, copyediting work, creative writing) and item. So all I need to do is add up the “words” column and I’m good to go. I’ve also decided to give this article half-credit, since I do a bit more than just paste boilerplate and fill in numbers (see the next section, for example). However, it will be counted in the following week’s total.

Blog posts and creative writing count full credit (with the exception of this weekly article, which counts half credit). Copyediting for other writers is counted at ten percent of the actual word count for the document; style sheets for that copyediting will count twenty-five percent. Editing my own work, if and when I get to that point, will count fifty percent of starting word count. 

How Did I Do?

My weekly goal is 2,000 words. This week, I published three articles to the blog, one of which was a creative writing effort.

• Weekly Word-Count: January 29 – Blog Post @ 50 percent: 231 words
• A Pro and Con View of Language – Blog Post: 1209 words
• Saucy Writing Prompt – Creative Writing/Blog Post: 402 words
• Two-Minute Drill – Blog Post: 444 words

Total: 2,286 words. I’m still making my goal: Being on vacation has, in fact, given me plenty of time to do that. However, because I am on vacation, and because I don’t want to exceed my 5GB/month bandwidth limit on my Verizon data plan, I’m not doing the sort of research I do at home, so my posts, while frequent, are fairly short. (Of course, many of you may view that as a Very Good Thing!)

Much as I wanted to, I did not get any more written on Darklight, but I did some mental outlining. I know roughly how Chapter 3 will start, and it will introduce a new major character, a point of view change, as well as some new conflict. Chapter 2 was begun last week, and there will be some more conflict there. I realize the vast majority of you have no clue about Darklight, but it’s the NaNoWriMo project I did not do last November. If I work on it for a year, instead of a month, I might have 50,000 words before December 1.

Looking Ahead

We’re still on vacation through February 17. Thursday evening, my brother-in-law and his wife drove up from Los Angeles, so we’ll be spending the weekend wining and dining together. I doubt I’ll write anything more before they leave on Sunday.¹ 

I should be able to get at least one blog post up Sunday or Monday. Sometime Tuesday (the earlier the better, but it won’t be till late morning, in any event) we’ll drive down to Santa Barbara. We’re hoping to explore some art galeries there in the afternoon. I may get a short post up Tuesday evening. 

On Wednesday, we fly to Orlando for a week at the Disney parks. Since we’re joining my son and his family, my free time will be extremely limited. And what little I’ll have, I would prefer spending with my granddaughter instead of blogging. However, I may still manage to get some short items posted while in Orlando.

The bottom line is, if I miss my goal next week, I won’t be too concerned. Same with the week after, when we’ll be home part of the week. But once we get home, I expect to get a lot done, even with some other non-writing projects I have planned. Maybe I’ll discuss them in a blog post next week.

Tagged as: accountability

{ 0 comments }