Joyously Prolific

One of the reasons I should never make big decisions in the middle of the night is that I'm apt to make odd big decisions. That's what I did last night. I looked at my total word count for the year so far and realized a 'dream goal' of mine was actually within reach. I could, if I pushed myself a bit harder, write 1,000,000 new words this year.

I've always wanted to do just one year of 1,000,000. Just to say I had done it. I figured up the totals and found out that if I did 4006 words a day for the rest of the year, I could make it. Doesn't sound too terrible. I've done well over 4000 words a day for some pretty good stretches.

So I decided to give it a try. As it happens, I have four more books that I have to transcribe/rewrite from old material for the eight book set, so that is going to give me some pretty good word counts anyway. I had thought to wait and do each one as I finished the previous one... but the last three overlap far more than the previous ones, and I wanted to get some lead-ins from book five in book four, so I started on it.

Then I got up today and looked at the idea. Ack. Well, let's look at my Excel spread sheet and really work out the totals. I can talk myself out of this...

For some odd reason when I was looking at all of this last night, I thought there were only three months left in the year after August. I don't know why. I'm usually pretty much aware of September in real life...

You know what that means, right? I had 30 more days to spread the writing out over. When I keyed in the numbers from yesterday's total (5370) it gave me 3105 words per day for the rest of the year.

Well, why not? If I could do it for 4006, 3105 shouldn't kill me. And if I can knock that number down into the 2500 mark it's not bad at all.

So it's official people. I am going for 1,000,000 new words this year. This does not count line editing and such, and that may slow me up since I still have several sold novels that will be dropping back my way some time soon.

Time, I think, to get to work...