Day Five: Go Speed Racer

Wordcount: 9458
Minimum target: 8620

Today I had only a brief window of time available for writing. In the morning AJ and I had coffee at Bittersweet Cafe with our friend Angie. Then we met up with our friend Ariana at Earth Island Institute, where she works, and had lunch at Cancun. By that time it was 2:00, and I had plans to meet a friend in SF at 5:30, so I was a bit worried about meeting my wordcount target for the day.

Oddly enough, I not only met the target, I exceeded it by quite a bit! Since I had a cushion of about 600 words from yesterday, I only needed about 1100 today. But I managed almost 2000! Could it be that pressure makes a difference? Could it be that I'm a more efficient writer when I'm not relaxing at home? Hmm, food for thought.

To track my NaNo work, I'm using a spreadsheet template from Huckleberry Hax. It's nothing too fancy--it lists the wordcount target for each day. When you enter your actual wordcount, it calculates how many words you wrote that day, credit/debit against the minimum, percentage of 50,000, and average words per day. It's nice. It also has some color coding for the different weeks! Today I added columns to track the hours I spend writing and count average words per hour. This information should help me set reasonable goals for myself in the future. Today I increased my "credit" from 614 to 838! Yeah!

In other news, I saw Where the Wild Things Are tonight. I wasn't crazy about it.