Status Report: Week Forty-Four

Weekly Wordcount: 19,214 words (compared to 10,908 words last week)
Average: 2,745 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Thursday 30 October, 3,820 words
Least productive day: Saturday 1 November October, 450 words
Year-to-date: 692,820 words (145,978 words behind target)

Two months to go… Well, less than two months of writing as we’re leaving Edinburgh on 21 December and will be living out of our backpacks until March or April 2009 (several variables yet to be tied down).

It’s pretty clear this won’t be the year I write one million words* (at least according to the rules I set up back in December… I’m sure I’ve written the words, “Yesterday you passed the following banking: [screenshot]… There was no outstanding credit in the X account, so the above banking has created an outstanding debit. Please pass corrective banking today,” five hundred times this year).

But.

News received this week has vindicated this ridiculous task… I won’t go into details until I know details, but let’s just say that the pie segments devoted to Short Fiction up to September were not just for the sake of graphs and word counts.

Was that cryptic enough? Perhaps I should just delete that whole paragraph… Nope, seems like I’m not going to.

Oh, I remember why I went down that path: to (partially) explain the large ‘Other’ slice in this week’s pie: a lot of ‘Hey, I got good news…’ emails this week.

I also sent off a poetry manuscript for the Crashaw Prize and an application for something writing-related…

Deadlines and vindication: two of the best word count boosters known to mankind.

*If you were wondering, I would have to write 6,400 words a day for the next 48 days to crack seven figures by 21 December. Unlikely given I’ve only written more than 5,000 words in a day three times this year (5,260 on Jan 26 being the highest single day wordcount).