10 Pages and How I Trick Myself

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I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving, and if you got up early to shop, you found what you were looking for!

I ended up with 10 pages yesterday because I've made it a game. See, I have this Excel spreadsheet that keeps track of my progress. The first column tells me how many words I've written, the second (the only cell I can manipulate) is the total number of pages in the document, and the last column gives me my daily word count goal. okay, let's see if I can explain what I do.

I try to make the first column end as close to a 250 as possible, because 250 words equals a page, right? So if I've written 1,780 words, I push till I have 2,000. If I've written 2,175 words, I push till I have 250. Increments of 250, see?

But if the total number of words, the cell I can manipulate, ends up just short of 500, I push till I get there. So if the total word count is 16,430 after I do the 250 trick, I push 'til I get to 16,500. Or if I'm at 16,830, I push till I get to 17,000.

There's another thing I do, too, but it might be MORE confusing to explain. See, the last column tells me how many words I should have written to meet my daily goal. So if I've met my daily goal, I look at the next day's daily goal and try to reduce it to 2,000 words. So, say, tomorrow my daily goal is 32,591. That's where I should be at the end of the day. So today, I made sure I wrote till I got to 30,591, so I only HAVE to write 2,000 words tomorrow.

Now, when I did that, that messed up the 250 rule, so I kept going. But that's the game I've been playing.

My characters are in New Orleans now. I didn't see that coming at all. Maybe eventually I'll have some romance in my romance novel.

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2 comments:

Marianne Arkins said...

I do stuff like that, too! It really works because it's a fairly easy challenge (what's a couple hundred more words?) and it REALLY adds up!

I'm glad to see you moving so fast. You're doing great.

:-)

Natalie J. Damschroder said...

I do the same thing! Same spreadsheet, I suspect (unless you created yours yourself).

Unfortunately, yesterday and today have KILLED my momentum. I'm afraid to look at my status. :(

Enjoy the rest of your break!

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I'm a mom, a wife, a teacher and a writer. I have five cats and a dog to keep me company. I love bookstores and libraries and Netflix - movies are my greatest weakness.
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