44 Day Challenge Wrap-Up
Dec. 12th, 2024 07:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynTo complete the challenge, I relied on many things I normally don't track, and one thing I've never done before -- "dictation word salad". By "dictation word salad" I mean "using dictation to transcribe stream-of-consciousness and then counting that for words." I used dictation to actually write some stuff, too, but my dictation requires so much editing that I generally found it easier to type instead.
During the challenge, I had a spreadsheet where I tracked fiction writing. This was just "actual words written for the draft of a story": it didn't include notes or anything else. This was for comparative purposes with November challenges from 2016-2023, where I've also only tracked words written for a story draft.
The breakdown for fiction drafted is:
Be That Way: 57,633
Apothecaria journal entries: 25,271
It Begins with Us: 798
The Secret Dragon: 2,826
Total fiction drafted: 86,594
Be That Way is the first novel where I've begun and finished the draft in a single month: I started writing it on November 1 and finished on November 17. That was fun and pleased me, since drafting a complete novel in a month has long been a goal. The draft will grow in editing: I plan to add at least one more scene to it. I wrote some Apothecaria entries at the end of October, and then finished the last entries for it on November 28. It Begins with Us was a soloRPG-inspired story; I don't know if I'll finish writing it out. It's not actually a soloRPG; it's closer to the tarot stories I used to write way back when. I used dictation to work out a messy kind of outline for it. The Secret Dragon is a new working title for what I'd been calling Koysko and the Witch. After I finished writing the last entries for my Apothecaria journal, I worked on the outline for The Secret Dragon, but I didn't start writing the actual draft until the last day of the challenge.
Besides drafting fiction, I wrote copious notes for fiction projects:
Notes for Be That Way: 2,199
Notes for The Secret Dragon: 18,087
Notes (dictated) for It Begins With Us: 4,886
Brainstorming on friends-to-lovers-to-enemies ideas: 2,251
Total notes for fiction: 27,423
I made some notes for the Apothecaria journal, too, but I've always made Apothecaria notes at the bottom of the file, and have deleted them as I wrote the parts they covered into the story, instead of preserving them in a separate file as I do with my original fiction projects. So I don't know how many words that was. They all got counted by 4thewords.
The outline for Be That Way was mostly complete already; I added several scenes to the end and fleshed out some parts in the middle to get into shape for drafting, but it didn't need much. Be That Way is a relatively straightforward story -- a polyamorous fantasy rom-com, in essence.
The Secret Dragon is also a polyamorous fantasy romance and I'd also made a good start on it. But the story for it is much more convoluted and fleshing it out took far longer. I actually went back through the notes/outline multiple times to reorganize it and prune out repetitive material. And it's still 24,000+ words total. o_o;;; I think the book will run long -- I'm guessing 125-150k. I haven't done my usual "breakdown and put in a spreadsheet'" method to make an estimate because the outline has So Much Detail. Be That Way had that problem too, of the outline being so detailed that I didn't want to paste it into a spreadsheet.
As anyone who's been looking at my blog can tell, I also wrote a bajillion blog posts.
Total blog posts: 32,036
I also counted miscellaeneous other text -- emails, discord messages, forum posts, whatever seemed worth copying/pasting into 4thewords.
Total misc whatever: 5,700
By halfway through the challenge, my wrists hurt from typing 5000+ words per day and I was struggling to stay on track to reach 250k. So I started using dictation, both to write (counted above) and to transcribe stream-of-consciousness.
Total Dictation Word Salad: 62,942
That leaves 33,396 words unaccounted for. A few thousand of this is copy-paste errors, where I accidentally double-pasted something into a file. Some number are notes I made for Apothecaria and deleted. The rest are deleted words, from changes made to documents while I was writing them. We used to call this "bonus words" that you got for writing in 4thewords instead of writing offsite and copying into 4tw.
The things I particularly wanted to write are in the first three categories: fiction, notes, and blog posts. That total comes to 145,987.
That's not 250,000, but it's still an awful lot to write in 44 days. Even the fiction drafted & notes category comes to 1,967 per day, which is pretty respectable.
I'd hoped to draft 100k of fiction during November and did not do so. I think this is an achievable goal, but I'd need to have outlines ready to go to do it. It's not common anymore that I have a book idea that's straightforward enough that I can outline it in a few days.
I don't know if reaching 250k overall slowed my progress on writing fiction. Having notes "count" definitely helped with motivation to outline. I think the super-detailed outline for The Secret Dragon will make drafting the book go well, too -- that was certainly the case with Be That Way. Also, I've actually reached my 2024 goal of "write two outlines", so I'm happy about that. Anyway, there's a certain amount of "writing anything at all will make it easier to write a specific thing." I write blog posts about twice as fast as fiction, but I very much doubt I would've written 17k more words of fiction if only I hadn't spent time writing 34k of blog posts. It's almost certain that I would've written less fiction if I didn't write any blog posts (or do any of the dictation word salad). But I don't know what the optimum ratio of "general writing" to "fiction" is. Probably less general stuff than thus.
I'd thought that once I finished the 250k challenge, I'd want to switch gears to illustrating Apothecaria, or maybe to editing. Or dealing with RL chores that I've been putting off. (I really need to deal with RL chores -- taxes and health insurance in particular -- whether I'm ready to deal with them or not). Or possibly even "chilling and playing games or whatever."
But yesterday, I was still in Keep Writing mode. I wrote ~2700ish words, mostly blog posts. I also illustrated the day's Apothecaria and mostly finished the one for today.
Today, I've been much more "chilling and playing games". I've finished today's Apothecaria and drew tomorrow's, and now I'm just staring off into space. I might do a little writing for my 4thewords streak. Or maybe I'll just click the "mend streak" button and continue staring into space.
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Date: 2024-12-16 07:12 am (UTC)