bookmark_borderWord Challenge

I used to be such a Word Count Queen. Spreadsheets, daily goals, everything. Then I started crashing in Writer’s Block From Hell and the dismal counts made it worse. Now I look at the final goal only. A book needs to be finished (as in after rewrite) at no less than 90K. Romance can be closer to that than other genres. Editing can hack that down significantly so aiming high is good.

Even during this year’s NaNoWriMo (which I won but didn’t get my word count in on time and so don’t have the cool winning graphic) I only keep track of current totals with an average on the side. As it got closer to the end, I added in a block for how much to go and how much I needed per day to reach that.

I really like another writer’s site called Inkygirl: Daily Diversions for Writers. She’s the one that has the website Will Write For Chocolate which is a cartoon series (she’s said she’s going to revive it soon). Anyway, she has a year long challenge for other writers. It is the “1000 Words a Day Challenge” (with options to do 500 or 250 words a day). It is a very very loose thing with mostly being individual thing as just a way to keep you going thing.

And I’m doing it.

Yeah, I know, word counts tend to be evil parasites but I think I can handle this one. And instead of doing 1000 words a day outright, I am going more for the average. So a little here and a lot there can still average out. In the sidebar to the right you’ll see the icon for this. Later I’ll put a page up where I regularly upload screenshots of the spreadsheet. Currently with 3 actual writing days, my average is at 1369 while the calendar average is 871.

bookmark_borderBrrr Freakin’ Chill!

That’s our forecast for the coming week (screenshot from Weather Underground). Look at the highs for each day. While not unusual here, it typically only happens for a week max, warms back up to “above Celsius” (a joke at the post office), and maybe dips back down this low for another week later. And that’s it. But this just keeps going.

We’ve had snow on the ground since The-Big-One-That-Knocked-Our-Power-Out-For-Five-Days. It has snowed about four times since then. We’ve got another new inch of snow last night. Typically, whatever snow accumulations we have are gone in three days.

UK is getting more snow and colder temps than their average.

Beijing (that’s in China) got a record snow.

What’s going on in your neck of the woods?