New year’s #WIP500 resolution

My resolution for this new year is very simple. I’m going to complete the draft of the novel I’m currently working on.

Of course, execution of this goal is unlikely to be simple. The longer I persevere with this fiction writing habit, the harder it seems to get. Possibly this is because I demand more of myself as time goes on.

Because I am someone who likes systems and structures and frameworks (and lists), I’ve tried to break this massive goal down into manageable processes. The most significant of these is my new daily target of 500 words. Whether I squeeze them in before work, or dribble them out at the end of the day, 500 words a day is the aim. This may not sound like much, but for me to keep that up for an entire year, on top of work and social engagements, will require a huge effort. I’m allowing myself to average them out over the week — a few more or a few less each day is OK, so long as the weekly word count is 3500. (And blog words don’t count!)

And then I heard about the #WIP500 project for 2012 launched by Cara Michaels. She’s done the maths for me – 500w every day for a year will yield 183K words — more than a novel. (Two novels for many genres.) She’s running totals on her web site and the interest from the online writing community seems to be escalating fast. Since this project aligned with my self-nominated quota, I decided to join in the fun. I think it will help to have Twitter friends to share the journey with, even if I am in a different time zone from most of the participating (US) writers and therefore out of sync with most of the conversation.

So that’s the plan. I started WIP500 on 2 Jan, but am trying to make up the words for 1 Jan across the week. There’s room for a little bit of cheating too, owing to Australia being so far ahead the USA on timezone. Means I could write pre-work this morning to make up words for yesterday, and still post them as 3 Jan words! The flip side of that is that I still need to write 500 words this evening… Better get onto it!