I haven’t posted since last Wednesday because I’ve been doing a very exciting thing called writing. Obsessively, ridiculously writing. I’ve written 22,429 words since last Wednesday, actually. That’s a 6-day average of a bit more than 3,700 words a day. Frankly, that’s staggering. And I’m the one who’s been writing that! What?! Is it JaNoWriMo and no one told me?! (Yeah, that’s a play on NaNoWriMo, I’m uncreative today, whatevs, I’m using my creative juices for my novel.) What’s really helped me work this week has been me avoiding the internet, either by going to Starbucks to write or by turning off the wireless internet switch on the laptop at home (or refraining from plugging the ethernet cord into it). I can’t really avoid internet on the desktop so I haven’t really been using it for anything aside from the internet.

To chart my progress this month, I’ve been keeping track in an Excel spreadsheet, as nerdy and techy as that sounds. What’s more amazing is my handy dandy high school Excel spreadsheet skillz (yeah, I didn’t really employ them in college) still apply, and I’m even turning the data I’ve been tracking into (colorful! Wonderful!) graphs of my progress. I input my data in the “new words” column. Using my supa-nifty formulae, the sheet calculates how many new words I’ve written this month and deducts it from my monthly word goal (which started out at 35K, but I had to re-adjust it as I realized I’d surpassed that. It’s now a proper NaNoWriMo-worthy 50K).

Then, I tell a graph to take the data in specific columns and compare it — one line graphs my cumulative new word count, one line graphs my constant word goal so I can see how far I need to go. Colorfully rendered, it looks like this:

As you can see, at my current pace I’m going to surpass 50K for the  month of January. Crazy! I hope I can do it — really, I think that it’d be exciting to have done more in this month than I did in November for NaNoWriMo. And I started on January 10th! (Or input my initial wordcount of the document in on that day and started tabulating from then on.) It’s a bit… surreal?

Possibly the stranger thing is how excited I am about how good and right this story feels. It’s so alive and wonderful and has some moments that make my heart pound. I’ve had a few giggly moments, too, but I’m starting to get to the point where things are going to get real sticky for our plucky protagonist & friends, real sticky indeed. Also, she’s just starting to come out of the shell she’s hidden in for the last while, which is having some fun and unexpected results for her and the cast. I’m in Act II (yes, I think of my novels as having 3 or 5 Acts, like films or plays… this one has 3) and things are getting interesting!

Anyway, enough *patpat*ing of my graphs. I love them and they’ve inspired me to write but I still need that word count for today to keep me moving toward 50K and beyond.

P.S. Bryan introduced me to http://thisissand.com/. It’s… well. Addictive. And simple. Oh, addictive, simple things on the interwebz.