Keep On Keepin’ On

I’ve been doing the 250 Words a Day Challenge for a little over three months now, and I think I’m ready to call it a success. I went off the rails a little bit in May, but even with everything that got in my way, I still managed to write almost 5,000 words that month, at an average of 150 words a day. Both April and June were much better, coming in at over 8,000 words each. If I had been on my own, I probably would have written something during these three months, but nowhere near the 21,196(!) words I wrote because of the challenge.

The question now is, what next? Do I continue with the challenge, or move on to something else? Lucky for me, the answer fell right into my lap. After being away from Twitter for a while, I logged back on to see several writer friends posting with the hashtag #ROW80. A little investigating brought me to A Round of Words in 80 Days, a writing challenge that, as the tagline says, “knows you have a life.” You can set any writing goal you like, as long as it’s measurable. It’s longer and looser than NaNoWriMo, so I can continue with my work-in-progress, which I love (NaNo wants you to start a brand new novel, which can be frustrating if you’re in the middle of another work, which I almost always am).

So, here is my goal for A Round of Words in 80 Days: Write 3,000 words a week. This is roughly 500 words  a day, six days a week, but having a weekly count gives me more flexibility than a daily one. I still plan on doing the 250 Words a Day Challenge, I’m just hoping that some or even most days I write a lot more. That should total about 34,000 words, more than enough to finish outlining my work-in-progress, Jade, and start writing the first draft. The challenge runs four times a year, so if it works for me, I can carry Jade forward and finish the first draft during the next 80 days. That puts me right on target with my 2011 goal of finishing the first draft by the end of December. I want most of these words to be in my WIP, but posts written for this blog will count too.

The latest round started on Monday, July 4th, so I’m jumping in a little bit late. Fortunately, I’ve been a little bit of a tear this week, so even without being officially on board, I’ve written over 1500 words since Monday. Woo! I’m looking forward to keeping that up and to encouraging all my fellow ROWers along the way.

Real Quick Update (7/10/11)

I’m doing a real quick update for the July 10th check-in because it’s already July 11th and I should be in bed. I was panicking because I had it in my mind that I set 5,000 words as my goal and when I went back to check my progress I’d only written 4,412 words since Monday. I was crushed! Here I was thinking that I’d been doing well, and I hadn’t even met my goal. It wasn’t until just now that I said, “Wait a minute, wasn’t I planning on averaging 500 words a day, with one day off? That’s 3,000 words, not 5,000.” Sure enough, I went back and checked and my goal was 3,000 a week. So instead of being under, I’m almost 1,500 words over. Woo! What a relief. 😀

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