Day: October 7, 2017

Daily Writing Check-in: October 7, 2017

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 2:17 hours finishing the 2 mini projects I started in the last 2 days.

So I got 2 stories into my timeline that weren’t there, one of which took some serious fitting in. And then I continued figuring out who I wanted to age 3 years, and who needed a different amount for whatever reason.

Now that these annoying issues are done and fixed, tomorrow I will go back to looking at the post-first-draft outline of “Pursuit of Power” and see what scenes need to be held over for a future book and which ones are important for the real story of this first book. Hopefully I’ll be left with a decent-length book when I’m done. And hopefully this will help me decide what to write for NaNoWriMo.

goal tracker day 7

For anyone out there who is participating in NaNoWriMo, feel free to check out my series of tips and tricks for the month, and also to add me as a writing buddy! (Let me know you came from here, and I’ll add you back!)

NaNo After November

/ Kristi / 2 Comments

Did anyone else see this?

goal trackers

There is a feature on the NaNoWriMo website where you can track writing goals any time you want! According to my NaNoMail, this was announced this year in May, but I don’t always read all of the mail they send outside of November, even less so when I’m living in a cave.

You pick a start date and a stop date (up to a 100-day range), and set your own goal, which can be a word count, or an amount of hours worked. Then when you click create, this is what you have:

goal trackers 2I have seen many ways that writers try to keep track of their progress toward a goal, from Excel spreadsheets to filling in a calendar (well, maybe not that many ways…mostly just a lot of variations of spreadsheets). I used Final Deadline after NaNo in 2013 to set myself a goal for finishing the novel I started that month, and I know that without a tangible goal, I would not have finished my very first novel draft 3 months after NaNo ended.

Just like NaNoWriMo doesn’t work for everyone, continuing to track goals and fill in a chart during non-NaNo months might not be something even every Wrimo will want to do.

But for the rest of us, this is a really helpful addition to the NaNo website. I’ve already created a project to help me keep moving on my NaNoPrep this month. Since I started with it a few days ago, I haven’t felt any lack of motivation, but it could definitely still happen. (Though so far the fear of not being ready at all when November 1st comes is keeping me going.)

Besides, I always love watching the graph climb higher during NaNo…it appeals to some specific part of my brain. So I’ve set a goal that will average out to 1 hour of prep work per day for the rest of the month, and we’ll see how this goes.

(I don’t know why my graph has those flat spots. That is the “par” line, and twice it keeps the same amount of hours for 2 straight days, then jumps 2 hours for the next day. I don’t know if it’s a glitch or something they built in that I just don’t know about.)

What do you think about this feature? Do you plan to make use of it or give it a pass?