Josie's Prinowrimo Page

This page was written 02/12/2003 updated 31/12/2003

The title of my current work in progress is Breaking Through.

As of the beginning of December 2003 my wordcount is approximately 85,000 words and I am approximately half-way through. I was really motivated by nanowrimo during November and have now decided to continue with the motivational tactics by giving myself a target every month. My target for December is to produce 30,000 words. This gives me a daily target of one thousand words per day with Christmas Day off. This is an entirely plausible goal as for nanowrimo I produced anything from 500-4850 words per day with only one day of zero words and generally producing around 2000 words per day, finishing at 50085 on 26th November. So for the last few days I've been organising my chapters and am now embarking on a slightly less manic month.

What is interesting is that I'm now looking at 30k as a reasonable goal rather than shivering in a corner horrified at the thought of having to produce this kind of wordcount. Thank you nanowrimo. Thank you so much.

For the six months prior to November I barely wrote a single thing, far too daunted by the prospect of such a long and convoluted plot. Now I'm half-way through and very excited. Of course, in writing intensely like this I have to refrain from editing at all - I'm leaving that till the end. So I know that once the lengthy first draft is finished, there will be an equally arduous task of editing. But that is really another story. I originally planned December to be Dross Deleting month, but this must now be put off to some distant future time, February or March 2004 possibly.

Anyway, enough waffle! Save it for the novel!

Oh yeah, and prinowrimo stands for Private Novel Writing Month, just in case anyone was wondering. It's my name for it, I don't know if anyone else is using this name. It was inspired by nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) which should really, technically be internanowrimo but that's just being pedantic...

Day 30

today's wordcount: 1935
total for month: 30256
hours of writing today: 1.5
morale(1-10): 10
percent complete (of 30k): 100%

View the excel spreadsheet here

Hooray! I don't believe I actually finished at the eleventh hour!! Literally - it was 10.30 pm on New Year's Eve that I did the final wordcount. The reason it is day 30 on the 31st Dec is that I missed out Christmas Day.

I'm having some time out of targets for January because I have an essay due in a week and need to edit some chapters as I'm submitting them for part of my MA. Current total for the whole book is 115k and I'd say I'm around two thirds of the way through (give or take five chapters). By Feburary I'll be set on another Prinowrimo so watch this space.

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