#WIP500 and Carpe Verba

Twitter is an ever flowing source of new and potentially interesting resources for writers.  Our habits of clustering hashtags at the end of our tweets means that eventually we get exposed to new stuff.   Friday I saw #WIP500 fly by in my #ROW80 stream, so I asked about it and got directed here for an explanation.

The short and sweet of it is that it’s a group dedicated to writing 500 words a day, with the goal of winding up with 183k words at the end of the year.  Since that’s in the ballpark of what I’ve been aiming to do for the last three years, it seemed like exactly the place for me.  I signed up and went ahead and submitted my YTD wordcounts to founder Cara Michaels (who may love spreadsheets as much as I do and gets immediate love from me for having one of my favorite quotes on her profile: You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Ray Bradbury)

Based on the whole notion of 500 a day, I ought to have 14000 words so far this year.  I’m about 3,500 words behind since there were several days I didn’t write due to travel or one thing or another, but I shouldn’t have a problem catching up in February.

The whole thing prompted me to look back at my productivity spreadsheets for 2010 and 2011, just to compare.  I only wrote 1 more day last year than I did in 2010. Upped my average daily words from 605 to 735, and wound up with about 23k more total words last year than the year before. I know I can do better than 126k in a year.  I wasted a lot less words last year.  Wasted 22k in 2010. Only 6k last year.  So what I’m writing when I’m writing is better the first time, which is efficient.  We all know I value efficiency.

Will I wind up with that 183k this year?  Who knows.  I already know I won’t write every day.  I’ve learned that about myself.  There’s downtime between projects and life that happens.  But since my average wordcount is consistently above 500, and if I can manage to nudge it up into the 850 range like I hope, that should give me a significant buffer such that I just might make it.

I’m such a stats geek.

Anyway, if you’re looking for additional peeps to hang out with for motivation, I highly recommend #WIP500.

Carpe Verba (seize the words)!

One thought on “#WIP500 and Carpe Verba

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.