Flip flop

So I switched stories; I found myself at a bit of a wall on Spirit of the Hunt (the handwritten one) so I switched over to the sequel. It's a bit liberating to be able to just change stories when I get stuck, rather than being wedded to one and forced to keep writing on it.

I think that Spirit is stuck because I was writing past the ending; it was stuff I needed to write, I think, since it was important character development, but I don't know that it will end up being in the final piece.

It's fun to go back to the sequel; I love those characters so much. It has a bit of the feel of a YA novel, and I wonder if that's how I might market it. It might be a better first attempt than Spirit would! Who knows.

Gotta finish one before I can start thinking about what order I want to try and publish them in!

Tracking spreadsheet for #WIP500

Because I'm writing offline, I'm finding it difficult to keep up with my daily totals. I'm writing them down, sorta, in my notebook, but I've been bad about it. I'm marking which day is which, but I don't want to re-count each time.

So I made a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs. See, I love spreadsheets... I'm not GOOD at them, but I love them. Eventually, I hope to have progress charts, reports, all kinds of things to show off how I did month-to-month and such, but for now, it's just the basics. I have it tracking your best day, how many days you've entered a count for, average words per day, totals, and the percentage of the total you've got so far.

I also have it flagging days you wrote under 500 with red, and over 500 with green.

Here's the clean copy so you can download it for your own use if you'd like to. Feel free to redistribute, edit, do whatever to your own copy. :)

My personal progress (which is terribly inaccurate for the first 6 days, because I kinda guessed based on G+ posts and what my totals are on Cara's site) can be found here.

I plan to continue adding to it as I figure out how to make Docs display the data in a useful way. I like charts.

Updated the layout

As much as I loved my beautiful green background and rainbow plant life... I've been a little tired of looking at it, and it was just plain cluttered. So I switched to something cleaner and simpler, and a lot easier to read.

Fare thee well, beloved template... you've served me very well.

Good progress!

Last night I got into the zone. I hit a good place in the story, full of angst and drama, and blew the #WIP500 goal out of the water. The 4th, I wrote almost nothing. I was so tired I couldn't focus, and only ended up writing about 150 words... but yesterday? 1500. SMOKED the total. That's a good two-day buffer on my 365 day challenge.

This 500 a day goal is proving to be very motivating for me. I'm not limited to a new work. Which is what I think torpedoed my NaNo this year... I didn't want to write something new. I have too may good WIPs to start something new. Being able to write 500 words on anything has been awesome.

So I think I'm going to write some more, and see if I can't write my January 6 totals even higher. :)

Right now, my FMC is angsting over her lot in life, not wanting to be a vampire (boo hoo, existential crisis) and the MMC is about to tell her to grow up. And it's going to be fun.

Stop doing that!

Ready to tackle writerly things for the new year? Stop right there, and read this list. It's 25 things writers should stop doing, right fucking now. And these are things that are all over the NaNo forums, where people worry about this or that, anything to prevent themselves from actually writing.

I started #WIP500 last night. I hit right at 500 words, estimated, and finished before bed. The cool thing is I had a spot of inspiration, and thought of a spiffy plot twist that just might result in me being able to combine the two endings I'm battling in a way that's sensible and pleasing to me.

I wanted to write more today, but I've been so cold that my poor fingers couldn't hold a pen, and barely type. I spent most of the day snuggled under a sherpa throw and two cats, just trying to stay warm.

So what do you think... can I really write 500 words a day, every day?

Can I do it for the whole year?

I can... but will I?

#WIP500

Joining a new challenge for the new year. I seem to do better with concrete goals to aim for (even if I don't actually complete them totally. So in the interest of that, I've joined #WIP500... the goal being to write 500 words a day. Not at all a hard goal... I can church that out in less than 15 minutes if I try. It'll take longer handwriting, of course... but I think I can do this. I've got about four WIPs that I need to work on, so this is the perfect motivation to do that.

I'll also be tweeting about my progress (or lack thereof.)

Let's do this thing.

For personal reference: 126.