Monday, November 19, 2007

Progress Report

So far, so fair. I'm behind on my word count "schedule" for NaNo--a few hundred words short of the 50% mark. To stay exactly on schedule I should hit 31,667 by tonight. I'm at 24,7xx. Actually, I seem to make pretty good progress, but there have been a good handful of days where I haven't gotten a chance to write.

Lets's see, like the good engineer that I'm paid to be, here's my newly revised schedule for completing on time:

19-Nov 26853.25
20-Nov 28957.5
21-Nov 31061.75
22-Nov 33166
23-Nov 35270.25
24-Nov 37374.5
25-Nov 39478.75
26-Nov 41583
27-Nov 43687.25
28-Nov 45791.5
29-Nov 47895.75
30-Nov 50000

That works out to 2104.25 words/day from now till the end. Can I do it? Who knows.

I don't know if my story will be complete by that point. I'm leaning towards not. I think at about 25k words, I might be 1/3 of the way through the plot. That's probably fair as 50000 is shorter than most books. I'll have to research a bit, but I think I should be hitting more like 80-100k for a (theoretically) publishable novel. We'll see.

2 comments:

Amanda said...

Novellas range from 50K - 70K word counts. Most novels are in the 80K and above word count. I know for paranormal romance genre novella is 70,000-75,000 and novels shouldn't be less than 90,000.

I use an excel spreadsheet that calculates where I compare actual to budgeted and then reproject based on actuals. Yup, I was an accountant.

BriteLady said...

My little table was a quickie pulled out of Excel. At work we have a project tracking system that makes pretty graphs showing your schedule progress (bars & lines showing projected vs actual) and cost progress indices (hours worked vs % complete in actual vs budget). Very nifty. I don't have time to be that fancy and still get writing done :) Maybe in December...