Saturday, November 26, 2016

Words, Words

Just a few hours ago, I successfully completed National Novel Writing Month, reaching 50,500 words! The book isn't done yet, but I know where I'm going and what I still need to add. And I'm thrilled to have met the goal because now each contribution to the novel after this is just icing on the cake.

Because I've been away from work for almost a week, and I'm finished with my meta-analysis course, I must be going through statistics withdrawal: as soon as I finished I was super-excited to look at the data, that data being my word count over the last month. Here's a graph of my word count by day:


And it's only going to go up from there! I definitely had days where it was difficult to find time to write, or I just wasn't feeling up to it, so I would spend that time outlining what I was going to write next, making notes about things I needed to research/fill in, and occasionally re-reading what I'd already written. It's kind of hard to tell on the graph above, so here's another way to graph the data, where good days and bad days are a bit easier to see:


So there are a few days in there where I didn't make much progress, which often occurred right after a day of great productivity. I know exactly what happened there. Sometimes I would have lots of free time and I would write as much as I could. The next day, if I wasn't feeling up to writing, I would tell myself not to worry, because I wrote a lot the day before.

I would love to look back over the month at different events, moods, and so on, and look at how that related to word count. Another day perhaps. For now, I'm celebrating my victory with good beer, and hanging out with my brother and cousin. I'll be on the road tomorrow, so probably won't get back to regular posting until Monday.

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