Tag: word count goals

March 2023 Wrap-Up post March 2023 Wrap-Up Post
Monthly Review

March 2023 Wrap-Up Post

Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I’d love to know why March felt like the longest and shortest month. Oddly, this month was busy, yet I spent a lot of the time resting and re-calibrating as I worked on The Reanimator’s Soul. It was sort of a weird month. Not good or bad, just a transitional month between projects and parts of the semester. Anywho, let’s see what my goals were and what I got up to during the month.

  • Read 8 books
  • Write The Reanimator’s Soul
    • Minimum goal 15k words
    • Real goal 20k words
    • Stretch goal 25k words
  • Enjoy spring break and actually relax (as opposed to using it to catch up)
  • Blog weekly
  • Send out my monthly newsletter
  • Do some digital art
  • Plan my goals for Q2

Books

My goal this month was to read 8 books, and I read 10.

  1. The River of Silver (#4) by S. A. Chakraborty- 4 stars, a great book of additional stories in a universe I was very sad to leave. Also, yay for some closure.
  2. The Two Towers (#2) by J. R. R. Tolkien- 4 stars, once again loving Andy Serkis being a one-man cast.
  3. Tithe (#1) by Holly Black- 3 stars, it was okay. I know this is one of her earlier books, and it definitely reads like my middle/high school experience. It was weird reading a book that takes place so close to where I live.
  4. Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert- 4 stars, loved this one. The neurodivergent and mentally ill rep was great, as always with Hibbert’s books.
  5. The Ancient Magus’s Bride (#17) by Kore Yamazaki- 4 stars, we’re still mid-arc, but I am enjoying it and hoping the conclusion of this arc will be satisfying.
  6. The Magus of the Library (#6) by Mitsu Izumi- 4 stars, I love seeing a mystery deepen and characters come into their own. This is a complex yet low stress manga.
  7. A Black Women’s History of the United States (#5) by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross- 5 stars, a great primer for further research.
  8. Circe by Madeline Miller- 4 stars, if Aragorn and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings was your jam but you wished there as extra baggage, this one is for you.
  9. She Loves to Cook & She Loves to Eat (#2) by Sakaomi Yuzaki- 5 stars, so sweet, so tender, so sapphic, and so much good food.
  10. Valiant (#2) by Holly Black- 4 stars, I’m not sure how this one ended up with more stars than book 1. The end sort of saved it for me because I really like Ravus and the whole Beauty and the Beast dynamic we had going.

Admin/Behind-the-Scenes Stuff

  • Finished the major compiling for the university literary magazine my class was working on (low key stressful since this was the first one since 2018)
  • Sent the university literary magazine to the printers
  • Wrote the preliminary blurb for The Reanimator’s Soul
  • Setup the preorder for The Reanimator’s Soul at all major retailers (except Google Play, which I will do soon)
  • Started doing crafts again, yay! I started working on a Halloween village plastic canvas kit from Herrschner’s, which I’m really enjoying doing since I haven’t done plastic canvas since high school. It’s very centering.
  • Made my quarter 2 goals and setup my Kanban board
  • Enjoyed spring break with only a bit of freaking out (my brain has been on fire all month)
  • Retail therapy for a case of the stressful sads, which means buying washi tape and planner stickers

Blogs Posted

Writing

If you saw my false starts blog post, you’ll know that I ended up basically rewriting the whole beginning of The Reanimator’s Soul. I’m not going to lie, I was very annoyed at first. I felt like I fell behind as soon as the month started, but ultimately, my writing word count goals take a backseat to story quality and starting over was necessary. I have to keep reminding myself of this when I internally freak out over being behind. Behind is better than words that are lukewarm and don’t make sense in the larger context of the work. It took me about a week to figure out what I needed to fix and how to make it better. In the end, I wrote 12,000 words this month, which I’m pretty happy with since all of these words make sense and have sent the story in the proper direction. I’m feeling much more confident at this point, so fingers crossed no major rewrites will be needed at the 25-33% mark.

Hopes for April

  • Writing (we’re feeling ambitious this month)
    • 23,000 words is the goal (770 words a day)
    • Because of this goal, everything else is sort of scant, which I’m fine with since this is also a heavy grading month
  • Read 8 books
  • Refill the well each week (aka do art, crafting, or game)
  • Blog weekly
  • Send a newsletter each month
  • Doctor’s appointment/taxes BOO
  • Start watching Sarra Cannon’s Publish and Thrive updated lessons
why i never nano Why I Never NaNo
Writing

Why I Never NaNo

Kara Jorgensen4 Comments

I have held off writing this post until the end of the month because I didn’t want to “yuck anyone’s yum” as the kids say. I have no beef with other people participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but for me, NaNo is a no-go. And I wanted to write about it for the writers who feel discouraged that they struggle to do NaNo or don’t like to do it, especially when it seems like everyone is participating, except you.

I jokingly refer to NaNoWriMo as “No Words November” for me. Where other people see synergy and community, I find myself crushed beneath other people’s massive (for me) daily word counts. Comparison-itis hits, and it hits HARD. My soul dies incrementally at the beginning of November with each friend who participates and posts that they wrote 2,000+ words in a day. On a personal level, I am very happy for them that they’re making progress and don’t want to mute the word or my friends for a month, but my inner writer is screaming in panic as I am lucky if I get 500 words a day during November. The more I see the large numbers, the worse it gets to the point that I often get so far in my head that I stop writing in November. This has happened repeatedly.

This is a me problem. I know it is, and I know I need to work on my comparison-itis, but I think for people who tend to be slower writers or who don’t zero draft, NaNo feels like an insurmountable task. During the height of the semester, I’m lucky if I can get 10,000 words a month. Part of my personal grudge against NaNo is that it’s in November, which is when I am a) perpetually exhausted from the time change/weather b) under a mountain of grading because that’s when the long papers roll in. It’s just not a convenient time for me as a professor to be doing anything extra, let alone stretching way past my normal word count.

If we could shift NaNo to like June, that would be great. I vividly remember being in college and one of my friends having a meltdown because she was behind her NaNo goal and her schoolwork, which she sacrificed to write more. I wanted to shake her. NaNo is one month, grades are forever. The same rule applies as an adult with a job. I’m not sacrificing my mental health and totally stressing myself out for something that in the long run doesn’t matter. NaNo is just another month, just another arbitrary activity, and my life and worth doesn’t hinge on a word count.

My process also doesn’t work with NaNo. The typical wisdom is that you shouldn’t edit as you go, which I have to do. Editing is my warm-up before I start my next writing session, and it keeps me from having to do a massive amount of editing at the end of my draft. On top of that, I am a plantser/gardener. This means that I don’t usually have an outline before I start writing or, if I do, it’s on an act-by-act basis or only a few scenes ahead at a time. Not being a plotter means that either I have to zero draft (messy, scant rough draft), which I really don’t like to do, or I need to rapidly figure out where the hell I’m going. My lack of forethought does not lend itself to this process. I do not like cleaning up a mess. I am the kind of person who cleans the bowls and pans as they cook instead of dealing with a giant mess at the end. The same holds true for writing. Without being able to edit as I go or having the time to do so while writing so much, it really isn’t worth it for me as I will struggle to finish a book that requires that much editing.

Know yourself and your process should be the main takeaway from this blog post. If traditional NaNoWriMo works well with your writing process, then you should definitely go for it, but if it doesn’t work for you or the way you write, it might not make sense to go for 50k words in a month and wreck your mental health or manuscript. Every year the FOMO gets me during week 1 when everyone’s energy is high and they are so enthused, but once the stressed posts set in, I realize why I don’t torture myself. I know I would hitch my self-worth as a writer to those giant (for me) daily word counts, and things would not end well.

If you haven’t enjoyed NaNo this year but feel like it’s necessary or a hallmark of a “real” writer/author, it isn’t. I have never won NaNo. I have only tried twice and failed both times. Camp NaNo where I’ve stuck to a more reasonable word count goal is the only way I can do NaNo. I have eight books out with several more cooking, so don’t feel bad if NaNo just doesn’t jive for you. You certainly don’t need to do it in order to finish your manuscript or to find a supportive writing community. You can do that all on your own any month of the year.