Cooper West ponderings

Word Count Wrap-Up: May

May 31, 2011 | Writing Process

It’s the end of the month, so I get to look at my totals. Joy. *head!desk*

I wrote 30,705 words over six stories (four novels, two short stories), with an average of 990 words a day. The first half of the month saw most of that wordage; the second half, not so much. Grad school classes started on the tenth, which includes a 9/hr a week “lab” working as a library slave, on top of my part-time job at the vet clinic (which involves heinous travel time). So maybe not so surprising. And hey! I wrote over 30k!

However keep in mind my GOAL was 2,500 words a day. In that sense, the month was total fail. The interesting discovery was that, throwing out the days I did not write at all, my average word count for writing days was 1,700. That’s at least at little closer to 2,000, so the lesson here is: write every day.

Part of my writing cycle is to start a story, make decent headway, then stall out and let it stew for a period of time. I get very impatient about that but trying to force a story to happen that hasn’t gelled in my subconscious is without a doubt both painful and pointless. My work-around to this is to write multiple stories at the same time. Almost half my word count for the month was for one novel; the other 15k was spread out over the other five works. One novel saw only about 500 words written for the month, but that’s simply how I do it sometimes. I have two other new story ideas that I want to start, but I’d really like to finish something first…that might be asking too much of myself, though. To be honest I’ve never really spent time with the numbers before, to see where my comfort zones are concerning daily word count and total number of stories in progress; I’m on a learning curve.

Right now, no matter what my goal is, I tend to write roughly 30k a month and work on approximately five stories at a time. I’m okay with the last part, but I’d really like to get my word count up to 50k, which translates to about 1,700 a day, which in turn is the average I hit on days I actually write. Back to lesson one: write every day.

The main bad thing over the last few months has been my complete abandonment of fanfic. I love writing fanfic, it is enjoyable when I let it. It’s just fun! But I’m feeling so guilty about my word count that I have a hard time allowing myself to write fanfic. It’s not a good thing to do, because it is metaphorically locking myself out of the playground until, say, I graduate from high school. Pointless. I need to chill out about it and let myself have fun every once in a while. *flaily hands of fail*

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