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Thursday, August 28, 2008

Writing Challenge Stats

I talked about the writing challenge going on with a small group of my writing friends. It's over now, and our results were incredible.
June was a tough month for all of us. Daily writing was difficult and finding a routine seemed impossible. Hence, the birth of the writing challenge. We used page counts for five out of seven days - so if you worked all seven, you kept your five highest count days. That left ample room for summer fun/obligations. The scoring was: one point for each page of new work and one point for five pages of edits/revisions. We all kicked in some cash for the prizes, and at the end of the week, the winner got a nifty Barnes and Noble gift card.
Everyone won at least once. Some of us won twice (raising hand), but what's really amazing is the amount of work we did. We didn't count critiquing, even for each other.
Between the five of us in seven weeks:
We wrote a total of 1, 050.50 pages. (translates into 262,625 words)
We edited a total of 4622.50 pages. (which is the equivalent to about 12 books.)
Together, that's about 14 books between 5 people in less than two months! We even impressed ourselves. I'd just made a comment about feeling like I didn't get anything done over the summer. Then, our fantastic spread sheet guru sent the tallies. And remember, this challenge started after the fourth of July. We had an entire month before that without reporting in.
We also did critiques for each other and our other critique partners. I did four full-length books, two partials, a short story, and several chapter critiques. But, like I said, those numbers weren't counted because the point of the challenge was to get new pages/revise our own stuff. Forward progress.
I'm still amazed at how awesome we did.
Now that school is back in session, we won't need such a high motivator all the time - just an occasional kick here and there.
So, there you have it.
I have to tell you, I feel pretty darned lucky that these ladies are with me on this journey. They keep me moving, help me keep my hope, refuse to let me burn frustrating manuscripts, tell me when something sucks hard, and hold my hand when life hands over crap.
Enough sap. I need to get to work.
Behave!

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