A word count update and some programming notes.

I haven’t been updating you on my yearly word count goals like I should be and that’s because I have a bunch of new eyeballs on the site thanks to NaNoWriMo and I wanted to build on that momentum by writing intelligent posts and not about yammering on about potatoes.

NOT THAT I EVER DO THAT, NEW READERS!! Whatever you’ve heard is a LIE! Ahem.

But, seriously, I’m really trying to focus the blog more so that you don’t have to be a regular reader to know what I’m talking about in any given post. And I’m trying to pepper these posts about my writing between more useful “article” type posts. Mostly, I want people to feel like they know what to expect when they come here (like they do when they visit The Whine Seller) which hasn’t always been the case. I’ve been working on this for most of the last year and since readership is up… I’m assuming it’s working! 🙂

So, anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah. Word count.

See, you know how NaNoWriMo encourages you to write 50,000 words in a month? Well, I do something like that for the entire year. It’s basically a little motivational tool to keep me on track with my writing. I felt like I met last year’s goal of 182,500 words for the year (which is equivalent to 500 words a day, if you were curious) so this year I upped it to 500,000 because I have no sense of proportion.

Then I came to my senses and realized that making this year’s goal nearly THREE TIMES last year’s was insane. So I decided to go for 365,000 words for the year, aka 1,000 words a day or double last year’s goal. Except that…

I passed that sometime in November. I’m closing in on 400,000 and should meet it in about a week. Hmmm…

So I find myself asking… is my original insane goal of 500,000 still somehow doable? It would mean writing well over 100,000 words in the single busiest month of the year (I own a retail store, remember). I don’t want to be defeatist but I’m thinking it’s not going to happen. That said, I’ve decided to shoot for the moon and just try as hard as I can anyway. I figure whatever my final count is can be my goal to beat for next year.

One of the ways I’m trying to get these extra words in is by shamelessly writing blog posts for next year in advance. I’m stockpiling them for the blogging apocalypse. I already write posts and then schedule them to post later all the time and next year is going to be so very much worse mwhahahaha! For instance? I’m writing blog posts for Script Frenzy which is still several months away. (But not as many months away as I would like. It’s sneaking up on me!) But I have a plugin that automatically pulls a post whenever there’s a week when I haven’t written anything and my hope is that the pre-written content will appear seamlessly alongside the timely content and all you’ll notice is, hey, Hillary’s been a lot more regular about blogging. When in reality I’ll be worse than ever! 😉

Anyway, if you’re wondering exactly where I am word count wise for the year, here’s a little potato update:

I have a few more pre-written blog posts posting in the next few days but this is probably the last one I’m writing live so I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and I look forward to chatting with all of you in the new year!