Camp NaNoWriMo – Day 5

I say Day 5, but is it really Day 7? It was certainly Day 7 of the month, and it’s probably Day 7 for a lot of other campers. But I’m not doing a 31-day writing month. I’m doing a 23-day writing month. Because I don’t work at the weekend.

Monday was a Very Busy Day. Tuesday was slightly less busy in that I don’t do the content editing job on a Tuesday. I only do that Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. So Tuesdays and Thursdays are a little more relaxed. My admin time was shorter too, as I didn’t have the weekend to catch up on.

It was still a busy day, though. And this time I determined to do my writing stint FIRST. I did, however, start off the dishwasher and the washing machine before beginning, though. And I did around half an hour of admin.

I set my NaNo timer for an hour again, to check my writing speed. By the end of the hour, I’d written 1,859 words, so I’d managed almost my entire daily target within just one hour as well as breaking the 10k barrier. Then I updated my spreadsheets and the NaNo page. And yes, these are all words for Catch the Rainbow. I’m not adding anything else to this.

I have this rather splendiferous spreadsheet that shows my writing and revision progress on 10 projects, and there’s this wonderful little graph too. It took a long time to create, even using someone else’s as a guide, and each month is a bit twiddly. But as I get used to using it, so too does it get easier to update each month. Adding the daily word-count is easy. It’s the creating a new sheet for each month that a little daunting.

This is how the top part looked by the end of Monday this week.

That timer in the bottom right-hand corner is my Toggle mini timer. It runs for 60 minutes and then prompts me to have a Pomodoro break. Then, 10 minutes later, it prompts me to choose a project and start again. If I’m working on the same project, I just hit “continue”.

This project is for “Diane Wordsworth”, funnily enough, and the actual project is “Admin”. “Catch the Rainbow” has one too, and so did “Richard Cadbury”.

You can’t see it in this picture, but beneath the % line at the bottom is a line for each day of the month. I update that each day with my word-count, and it automatically feeds into Cell M25, as well as into the calendar in the top left corner.

It also feeds into the “TOTAL 2020” sheet you can see on the tabs at the bottom as well as the “PLANNER” sheet, which is an overview of all 10 projects, complete with a countdown for both the word-counts and the days left to write. I’ll share that sheet another day.

To the right of the “AT A GLANCE” section, off screen, is the data for the graphs. As you can see, I only have one project on the go at the moment, and it’s a writing project rather than a revision project. As I get used to doing this, I’m hoping the spreadsheet gets more populated.

With NaNo out of the way, it was another hour for the private client, and then it was 5½ hours for the Greek client.

I was interrupted by a delivery of my new bright yellow diary, and then the brightly coloured notebooks came, which was quite exciting.

The dog was a lot better. He only woke me twice during the night instead of four times, and he didn’t wake the poet at all, compared to twice for him on my 4x night.

word meter from Writertopia

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