2012 stretch goal: one meelion words

All right, Junkies, time for my 2012 New Year's Resolution. I cover some other resolutions in tomorrow's ALL-PRO Episode #10, but the big one is this:

• That's 4,000 pages of copy (at the industry standard 250 words per page)

• That's the equivalent of 11.4 INFECTEDs.

ARealGirl has set up a simple formula for me: 3,000 words a day, 333 days of writing (plus a bonus 1,000 words in there somewhere). I normally write mornings, Monday through Saturday, with Sunday off. That schedule, however, is only 312 days (52 weeks x 6 days a week). That means if I'm going to have any days off, some days I have to write more than 3k. Add in a few vacation days here and there, and I'll definitely have days where I crank out around 5k, which is a real bitch. 

 

This goal is for all new words, so I can't count the second and third draft of a 100k novel as pushing me to 200k and then 300k. However, I have to edit and rewrite. When I do that, my writing program (Scrivener), tracks new words written each day. So if I edit 1k words, but in the editing push that to 1.5k, then I get to count those 500 new words. The bitch of this is, some days I'll edit a 1,000-word section and finish up with 750 -- which means I have to clock -250 words in my overall year count. 

 

So, when you're looking at 1,000,000 new words in a year that includes multiple re-writes of THE MVP and PANDEMIC, I have my work cut out for me. 

 

We set a goal to write 3,100 words a day on writing days in December. We averaged 3,067 a day for a total of 70,538 in the month (I'm banging away on THE MVP first draft, so that helps). 

 

Because, like Nicky Santoro in CASINO, I'm stupid. That's my business. I write myself into a coma. And just about the time I'm waking up from that coma, I start writing again. Because I'm stupid. 

 

No. 

 

(random line of text to update this post and test the commenting function, nothing to see here, move along ... )