I decided to make some tweaks to my wordcount tracking spreadsheet to give myself a break. On the 11th, a week ago today in fact, I cut 3,000 words from TUS to make the first act snappier. That amounted to the culling of an entire chapter’s worth of content, and indeed in its shorter WattPad-era chapter lengths, almost two. None of it is missed, but it does mean on a data tracking level, data gets missed, because I wrote a lot of content for TUS that now isn’t there. I tracked the wordcount on January 1st – thank you Google Docs for previous versions, just one reason I feel it’s the only writing tool to use – and then took the amount I ended up below that total (1,016 words) on March 11th off of the amount cut (3,039 words). That left me with 2,023 words of content I wrote this year in gross, but lost in net. I had to account for that, because however you slice it that’s 2-3 days worth of 1K I was writing off. Cuts are vital, but dismissing effort is unacceptable.
After debating it a while, I chose to add 3,039 to the total for the year, which writes off the cuts made on that one day. Now yes, all my other totals on my tracker are net, because Google Docs doesn’t track gross words added – just another reason along with Google’s questionable ethics that I wish Docs wasn’t the only writing tool to use – but as this was such a substantial cut it messes up all my daily averages. WHT is net -33 words this year to date, but that’s not large enough to mess up the total by a meaningful amount. So with all that factored in, my average daily wordcount – excluding page-a-day diary, bullet journal, Oreacle and odds-and-ends fiction – is 1,148m rounded down. I mean, damn. And you know what’s funny? Even with that huge cut I made, I ended up only 40 words down on that average at 1,108 words a day rounded down. March has been unbelievably productive.
I mean it when I say ‘unbelievable’ because I wouldn’t have ever assumed it was without looking at the data. I have felt miserable working on HOF, and chipping away at TUS before the last 10 days of work was even more excruciating than that. And for all that toil, it turns out a lot of the pain raw-numbers wise remains in my head. Now yes, the problem with HOF isn’t wordcount it’s quality, but even so it’s reassuring that at my most dejected I seem able to power through. That may face an interesting test in a month or two if Project4 folds, which it might very well do. You might not know what Project4 is – and no I still can’t tell you, sorry my imaginary reader – but trust me, it would be heartbreaking if it does, and it’s still arguably likely it will. I guess then, it’s reassuring to know I look set to brave that storm. Here’s hoping it never hits.
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