March's Writing Goal Results

Monday, April 4, 2016

Written by Kodi Wolf at 7:19 PM

Success! I worked on the outline for Lights of Life every day for the month of March.

I tried not to make my daily word count quite as important for working on the outline as I had for the 500 words a day goal, but I still used it as a goal post overall. And even though I had 10 days where I wrote less than 500 words, my total word count was 20,090, which averages out to 648 words per day. My lowest words per day was 146 and my highest was 2,169 (that was actually on the last day because I really wanted to hit 20,000 words :) ).

I think what's been really cool is maintaining my streak (I'm at 87 days today). I even went on vacation for the last week of March and still got my writing done. Corene has been really supportive, too. I love it when she's all impressed at my year calendar on my corkboard that has all these days with green X's in a row (the first 8 days of January have black X's where I didn't write because I was sick, but the rest are all green).

My corkboard with my writing calendar and my favorite inspirational note I wrote for myself a few years ago. Oh, and the little scroll piece in the corner says, "Once Upon a Time..."
(Full-size image)

My goal for April is to continue working on the outline, which has been coming along great. I find I'm doing this sort of hybrid thing where I fill in a few blanks or little details in the outline that I pretty much already know, but just haven't written down yet in the right place. But then I'll come to a spot where I'm really not sure about something, so I go brainstorm. Then those bits get added into the outline, and then I'll start actually writing some of the text or dialogue.

It's been really cool to be scanning through my outline and find part or all of a scene already written. And then there are some synopses where I just can't wait to start writing the scene, so I know that part of the outline is done and I'm going to fly through it when it comes time to really focus on just the writing.

Well, here's hoping I can keep my streak going through April.