This weeks is the first full week of work logs.
Right click and open in a new tab to get it to full screen size, so you can read it, if it’s too small on the screen
I’ve cut and paste a few of the critcal columns here:
| Word Count Start | Word Count End | Total Word Count | Words/Hr | Avg W/Hr | Total Words/ Year | |
| MON | 6,033 | 12,298 | 6,265 | 1,253 | 1,437 | 710,287 |
| TUE | 12,298 | 18,758 | 6,460 | 1,292 | 1,435 | 716,747 |
| WED | 18,758 | 24,946 | 6,188 | 1,375 | 1,435 | 722,935 |
| THU | 24,946 | 32,118 | 7,172 | 1,434 | 1,435 | 730,107 |
| FRI | 32,118 | 39,013 | 6,895 | 1,379 | 1,434 | 737,002 |
| SAT | 39,013 | 41,679 | 2,666 | 1,333 | 1,433 | 739,668 |
| SUN | 41,679 | 46,439 | 4,760 | 2,380 | 1,441 | 744,428 |
WordPress, alas, doesn’t allow me to make pretty tables.
It was a good week:
- I wrote every day
- I got on a roll on Sunday and wrote a few pages very quickly.
- My total word count for the week is 40,406 fresh words on the current manuscript, which is only 3,000 short of a full novel.
What the sheet doesn’t tell you is that I didn’t hurry to get these numbers. I was actually striving for a very normal week as a good starter sample, so I didn’t push for maximum word counts, use sprints or any of the other to-the-mattresses emergency strategies I use when I need to get a lot of words down quickly.
Also, I wrote for a lot of hours. I do five hours every week day and two hours each weekend day. These standard hours are what I do every week, plus a bit of bonus time on Sunday, when I really got going.
If you’re working a day job, the point to take note of is the hourly rate. Depending on how many hours you can devote to writing around your day job, if you achieve the same word count per hour as me, then you’ll see real progress on your writing.
As I’ve mentioned, my last full year of working a day job, I wrote and published 12 novels.
Writing more is a product of writing faster per hour and spending more hours in the chair. I will help you increase both those rates over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, if you’d like a copy of the blank, working Excel spreadsheet, click here.
Until then…back to work for all of us.