Happy Update Day!

I've decided to instigate a new feature on this blog, the Wordage Report. I'm going to keep track of the words I've written during the week and then post it here on Tuesdays. This will serve two purposes. It will ensure I do my minimum of one post per week here, plus it will encourage me to write more because I don't want to have to show a zero word count, thus revealing me to be sad and pathetic. LOL

If you've been over to my main blog, you'll have seen I've started writing out daily to-do lists. Each day has four things I want to accomplish, even if I get nothing else done. One of these things is to write. A while back I set myself a goal of 500 words a day, but 500 seems like a lot, so I've since lowered it to a minimum of 250 words, but they have to be new words - not a blog post or email, but new words added to a WIP.

Yesterday it was closing in on the time where I have to feed the cats (which also means stopping to make and eat supper, and some nights I don't get back to the lap top until after 11 p.m., if at all) and I realized I hadn't written my daily words yet. So I opened up a WIP and wrote some. Just like that. Hopefully I'll be able to do it again today. :-)

So it can be done, and it was pretty painless, which all writing should be. Editing's a different story of course, but the initial writing shouldn't be a chore. At least that's what I've been told.

Last time I mentioned a post by Chuck Wendig on getting a novel written, and one of the things he suggests is taking weekends off. So I tried it over the weekend and it felt really freeing. I'll be talking about it at length as my Wildcard Wednesday post on my Main Blog, but I thought it worth mentioning here.

But despite the fact I didn't plan on writing over the weekend, that didn't stop an idea for the blurb for An Elemental Earth from popping into my head. And yes, I wrote it down during one of my breaks so I wouldn't forget it. :-)

Wordage Report

So . . . this week's report is going to look a little sad and pathetic because I just came up with the idea yesterday, so I'm going to include a bit of an explanation of each category. And just so you know, after much soul searching I decided not to include email. Technically emails are all new words, and some of my emails can be seriously long, but emails are targeted for the recipient only, not the general public. Same goes for journal writing and snail mail.

Blog Posts (not counting this one)
750 words
Again, I debated about including blog posts, but as someone pointed out to me, these are my creations and they're new words, so they should count. Sounds good to me.

New Ideas
None yesterday, but that doesn't mean I don't get them. And if I take the time to write them down so I don't forget them, I think the words should count. It is, after all, part of the creative process.

Editing
Here's where it gets tricky. I've got a lot of unfinished, partially finished, and finished but needs polishing stories. While I'd like to somehow acknowledge the work I do on any of these, the word count isn't an accurate measurement because I'll be deleting words as well as adding them, so it'll throw the whole count off. So perhaps for the sake of efficiency I'll be keeping track of the time I spend editing instead. Which for yesterday was zero. :-)

New Words
I have three WIP on the go right now, and while I'll be updating the progress bars in the side bar once a month, I'll fess up to the number of words I've done on each of them each week here. But sometimes I might get the urge to work on something else, like a flash piece or a short story, so any new words I write can be included here.

An Elemental Earth - 100
Lucky Dog - 519
Total New Words - 619