The month has flown by. There is no Idea Series post this week, unfortunately, because a) I have been too into writing and my own head to remember to do anything else and b) I bought Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and spent the entire weekend playing it without break.
But there is still progress to report!
The Higher Silences
Total Word Count: 33,191
Words Today: 1684
Thoughts: This is getting big enough now that I have to go back and reference previous scenes / chapters to ensure continuity is not broken and that I haven’t already said a certain thing in a certain way. I’ve only been this far into writing a novel less than a dozen times and it’s still new to me. Definitely more work than you would expect. Writing is hard, who knew?!
Untitled Collaboration
Total Word Count: ????
Words Today: 0
Thoughts: This project, for me, has fallen to the wayside. I don’t have the bandwidth to do both. I’m still accumulating thoughts on it, however, and will be returning once the other project is “finished.” I haven’t been a very good partner, though. The other writer hasn’t made very much progress and I haven’t been good at reminding him / checking on him. I should do better!
Procrastination
There’s no better set of procrastinators in the world than writers. We will go through such extreme lengths to not write that we develop entire software suites, learn entire new hobbies, languages, skills, etc.
In the name of this lofty pursuit I threw together a little spreadsheet to track my overall word count progress. This is partially for keeping myself accountable in the long term, outside of NaNoWriMo, and partially just because I really like numbers and spreadsheets. I’d like to come back in a year and see just how many words I’ve written, which projects I’ve started and stopped or finished.
Here it is in Version 1:
As you can see, Pokemon has really thrown off my feng shui!
In the further pursuit of being a professional procrastinator, I might make a little web app with fancy looking reports explicitly for this purpose. Time will tell.