The Beast Within

Because I didn’t get very much done on The Beast Within for NaNoWriMo in the end, I determined to add it to the planner for the last month of this year.

So I sat down and counted how many writing days I have between now and when we break up (13 after today), and I decided to aim for around 2,000 words per session (26,000).

I’m going to count Monday, even though it’s the last day of November. And I’ve added the number of words written so far (4,880).

That gives me a total December target of 30,880. (But because I’ve already written 4,880 words, the target to write before 17 December is still 26,000.)

Any additional work, at the weekend, of an evening, during the holiday, etc, will be pure bonus. The total target for this one is 80,000 words, so every bit will help.

I’m experimenting with a couple of things on the 10-project planner, and one of those is the calendar I have at the top of the page. This is where all of the day’s writing is totted up.

Until now, I’ve always used a calendar that runs from Monday to Sunday. But that means I have to re-calculate the formulae on every sheet, and then again for every year.

So for December 2020, I’m trying to run the calendar from 1 – 31, and changing the days of the week instead. That should keep the formulae intact. I’ll work with it for December and keep what works.

Once I’ve run with it, I’ll start to add new projects for the new year, and calculate how much work I’ll need to do on each and when.

I’ve already spent a lot of time on this today, and I also have 2 articles to edit for the India client. So I’m leaving the planner where it is for now. I’ll do a bit more next week and the week after. I still have to do the totals page at the end.

I’m also experimenting a little with the blog home page. I can’t decide whether or not to have featured images. I think they all clash with each other, so I may go through and remove them all again. (I don’t think you can see what I mean on mobile devices here, so if that’s what you use to read the blog, please feel free to ignore this section.)

Here’s the December page for the 10-project planner, as it looks today. The pale yellow is time off or fields I don’t have to worry about filling in. As you can see, I don’t have a lot planned for December.

The pink and blue boxes up in the top right-hand corner are the data for the graphs. The lined box to the right of the spreadsheet is a notes section.