I’ve been tracking my productivity all this year and since a couple of you data geeks have encouraged me, I’ll keep posting it. I’m definitely still tracking it, and will be through the end of the year at least. This is going to be a rollercoaster ride, could be interesting to look back at the end and see how it affected my work.
I managed to make my daily wordcount goal of no less than 100 words. There were a couple of days I was under the weather or tired and I did the bare minimum – I think the lowest day was 126 – but I discovered that tapping out a hundred words with my thumb and forefinger on my phone worked in a pinch. I don’t use both thumbs, like my daughters. Just never learned that typing method. Although I have noted at this distance I can finally touch type fairly rapidly without looking at my fingers often if at all – there are benefits to having written as much over the years. I wasn’t a very good typist ten years ago.
One other thing I was pleased to see was my daily average over the month stayed about the same as last month – just under 500 wpd. I briefly toyed with making my daily goal in June 500 wpd, but realized I have stuff going on this month that is likely to distract me. I made the goal 200 wpd – still a glacial pace in writing terms, but at least more of a challenge – and am hoping to continue my monthly upward trend in production.
May beat out April by a mere couple hundred words. We shall see if I can keep the trend going on. One thing I have not been tracking, and I ought to, is what projects I have been working on most. I know that a great deal of the 15K words this month went into The Case of the Perambulating Hatrack, which stands more than 20K words in length and is headed toward novel length. But I also wrote and finished a short, The Violet Mouse, at 3500 words. I worked on Tanager’s Flight, which I must plot soon, before I get any more lost in the weeds with that book. It’s standing at 10K words but it’s a hot mess. Goal for this weekend I suppose is to get Plottr up and running and sort that all out. On the administrative side as well I need to make an editing pass over Violet and submit it to the market I wrote it for. I have had another story accepted to an anthology and come back to me with editor’s notes that will need worked on. None of these things count as ‘words’ but I must do them as part of the business… along with working on new covers for the Noir books. It is long past time.
This month? 200 words per day. Find the missing dictation for East Witch. Plot Tanager. And of course weekly progress on Hatrack. I think 200 wpd is not enough!