I put myself on a regimen after Labor Day: 60,000 new words of Heatstroke Heartbeat by the end of the year. (Heatstroke Heartbeat is the third installment in a quartet about the illegal underground dragon-racing scene in the city of Yemareir; the first two books, Brimstone Slipstream and Windburn Whiplash are awaiting cover art before I publish; 60,000 words should be enough to complete the draft.) The chart shows progress. I started behind and remain so. But I haven’t gotten more behind! Much.
The progress piece of it (red line, blue bars) is pretty standard, you can get this in Scrivener and other writing software: Linearly increasing daily target based on how many words you need to write in how many days, actual progress plotted against it. And this is important, but I think the metric I’m most proud of is actually that purple line. “Rate to finish” just means, based on current progress and days remaining, how many words do I have to write each day to hit the target word count by the target date. It’s going to be very stable in the early part of the project because even entirely missing a day means I can distribute the 500-ish word target over 100 days or so. As I get closer to the finish line, big misses (or big surpluses) are going to make it swing a lot, because there’s less time to make up the words.
Anyway, I like it because it gives me a precise target for the day accounting for what’s already been done. As long as I exceed the rate to finish, I’ll finish early. On the days when I don’t, I’ll at least know exactly how much more I need to do.
My aspirational daily target is 600 words, for a cushion. I haven’t hit that yet. But I’ve hit rate to finish for three days running now — so even though I’m below my target total, in a very meaningful sense I’m still on track.
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