Leading up to NaNoWriMo 2021, I began tracking my word count, wanting to get into the swing of things for when November started. (There’s another post on here explaining what NaNoWriMo is for those of you who don't know.) And for a while, I enjoyed seeing how much progress I was making every day, and so I continued tracking my daily word count past November. When 2022 came around, I decided that I wanted to write five hundred thousand words in that year, and I did over nine hundred thousand. However, I was using my writing as a way to avoid dealing with my emotions, and my writing got a little unhealthy (especially in June, where I wrote over one hundred eleven thousand words). As the new school year started in the fall, I was struggling to make time for my writing, and I watched as my word count steadily declined, and with it, my opinion of myself.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to take a week off of tracking my word count, just to see if it made me enjoy writing again. To no one's surprise, not being obsessed with numbers made me enjoy writing for the sake of writing, not because I had some number goal I had to reach. So, I retired my monthly calendars where I would keep track, and I haven’t done it in months.
As November approached, I decided that I was going to attempt NaNoWriMo, and only track the word count for the project I was working on. I would begin tracking again on the first of November and only on “Love Through Anguish”, and the last day of my tracking would be November thirtieth.
I’ve also learned that keeping a tally of how many words you write in a day is a challenge when you’re spending hours handwriting notes, which is how I spent a lot of September and October. I enjoyed seeing my daily totals, but not enough to count every single word I was writing in every single notebook. And because there are so many projects in so many different stages of development for me at all times, it’s not really feasible to keep track of all of that.
At the time of me writing this, I haven’t started tracking my word count again. However, I’m not too worried about it, since I have so many other projects on the go that it’s kind of impossible to keep track of everything, and I know how unhealthy the numbers game got for me. I will keep y’all updated on whether or not NaNo makes me want to track my daily word count again.
That's all for now, folks!
-C
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