Sunday, December 04, 2011

A Bit Off the Mark


This week I fell a little short of my ROW80 goals.  Well, sort of.  

My goal was to hit 65,000 words by December 22.  I'm still well on target to hit that, and I wrote more than enough words on Monday and Tuesday to cover this week's quota.  However, I now know that I'm not going to hit story's end at 65K.  I'm hoping I'll hit it by 90K.  I'm going to push for 90,000 by month's end.  I'm also still pushing for finishing the story by the end of the month.  But if I'm going to do that, I need to get my act back together.

Monday and Tuesday I wrote lots, of course, to get to 50K and win NaNoWriMo.  On Wednesday, I gave myself a day off from the novel to get my November newsletter out, do my check-in blog post, and generally let my brain rest.  That day off was planned, so no problem there.  Thursday I planned to work on some outlining, and I did that, so that's good.  Friday and Saturday were scheduled as writing days.  I did not write.

Today is also a writing day.  I'm using this blog post as a little bit of a warm-up, then I'm jumping back into my story.  I'm not going to push for the whole 3,000 words I had planned for the weekend.  I'm going to go for at least 1,200.  That's a good day's work, should get me through the current scene and the end of Act I, and should get me warmed up and back in writing mode.

I've also re-evaluated my goals.  I'm increasing my weekly word goal from 5,000 to 7,500.  This is, in part, to help me get to the finish of the story by the end of the month, but also because 5,000 words a week is a little too easy a goal.  7,500 has a frisson uncertainty to it.  It's definitely a do-able goal; the NaNo goal works out to 11,669, and I know I can do that.  But 7,500 is going to be just tough enough to make me reach for it a little.  And I've realized I do better with some time pressure.  Or, as my boyfriend said when I was running this idea by him, "Makes sense.  You need it somewhere between 'no problem' and 'no way.'"  

Here's my game plan for the coming week, then I'll wrap up this way-too-long post:

Monday-- Planning day
Tuesday-- Writing day
Wednesday-- Planning day
Thursday-- Writing day
Friday-- Reading day (currently reading a book on outlining)
Saturday-- Writing day
Sunday-- Planning day; possible extra writing day

See you Wednesday!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You added yeast to your WIP didn't you? I swear those ideas just LOVE to grow beyond where we want them. Good luck!

Anonymous said...

I think most of us that NaNo'd took a few days off afterwards to regroup. You have solid goals and an excellent plan to manage it so my bet is that you will succeed.

Have a great coming week, Kim :)

Live, Love, Laugh, Write! said...

You can do it! I don't have a word goal at the moment - but I'm back in the trenches with ya today :P

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