Greetings and salutations from the southern United States. It is I, the Graham half of our writing Ettin. So progress tracking, eh? I guess that comes back to motivation. I love the world building. I love the storytelling. I love talking about the ideas, the brainstorming, the debating. But the writing part? That’s actually work! How dare you? 

 I’ve never done NaNoWriMo. Clevenger has told me about it, and I’ve looked into it, but that is such a daunting task. I can get through a short story, sure. I can write abstracts. But I proved to myself three times that I can’t write a novel. I get too sidetracked. I start other projects. I go off and write other tangents. But then Clevenger had this idea of us working on a book together. He had the action, I had the characters. He could structure, I could write. I had organized ideas in my head before, but had never bothered writing an outline. Clevenger sold me on the idea of writing our story out, first in a rough outline, then filling it in with short scene descriptions giving the theme, characters involved, mood, and tone. 

 Suddenly, I didn’t have to write in chronological order. I could scroll through the list, find a scene that caught my interest, and write it out. And even better, I had someone giving me immediate feedback (validation!) and motivating me to stay on track. Writing completely changed for me. I had clear goals, a clear plan to follow, and a cheerleader sitting right over my shoulder. We even had a goal: to finish a book and be able to brag that we had actually written a novel. Our end goal was simple. Write the damned thing, edit it until we felt it was good enough, then pay some print-on-demand place for two copies, so that we could point to our bookshelves and go, “That’s ours. We did that.” 

 But then Clevenger went and played dirty. He learned to write, he listened to my feedback, and he became good at it. Then he went and started writing faster than me. The gall! The nerve! How dare! Sure, we were still writing slowly overall. It especially became even more daunting when we realized that the story we wanted to tell was more than one book in size. Our three act book was quickly shaping up to be a three book series. Still, we slogged on. A scene here, a section there. We didn’t have serious goals or timelines, just a hobby we kept talking about. 

 But behind my back, Clevenger had betrayed me again. He had gone and set down “what if” timeline goals, just to see what it would take to finish the first book by Christmas 2021. And he started going around actually writing to meet those goals. Well, I couldn’t have that. I was the writer, remember? He was the planner. I couldn’t let him out-write me. Time spent goofing around at work became time I could write out scenes. Time waiting in the car for a roommate became time I could hash out a particular dialogue. Time spent on Minecraft became time I could write. Next thing we knew, we only had ten or so scenes left in our outline, and we had come very close to the 70,000 word goal Clevenger had set. It had taken probably 18 months to write 20,000 words, but then a fire got lit from somewhere, and we blazed through another 50K in six months! 

 July 19 of 2021 I put down the last words and posted the last scene of our outline, officially completing the rough draft of our novel! How had this happened? We were six months ahead of our Christmas deadline. Of course, we couldn’t let that sit. Clevenger ran some more numbers. What would it take for us to finish the second book’s rough draft by Christmas instead? Turned out that would take 3500 words a week, from each of us. Hmm. Our scenes were averaging 2500 to 3500 words each. So could we write a scene and a half a week? We had just finished averaging much more than that. Of course we could! 

 So we each set down our own tracking system, based on what would motivate us. Clevenger needed to see his percentage in comparison to the end goal. I just needed a weekly target. I started a simple notebook, total words written that week, and a running over/under total based on the 3500 words I “owed” the project. Funny thing, but July 19th we had 12,000 words that had been written in advance. We hit our target goal of 90,000 words in 10 weeks, barely over two months. We still had a half dozen scenes still to write, and the last 30K words took another three weeks to complete. But seriously, we just wrote a 122,000 words rough draft in three months? What? How? All because we put down a weekly goal, committed to it, and helped each other completely bust through it! 

 So Clevenger is getting his “alchemy” from his target goals and planning. I get mine from my best friend and cheerleader. Every Friday we hop on Discord to discuss where our current scenes are hung up and what goals we want to write the next week,. We brainstorm character beats and plot twists we have been contemplating. We add, subtract, and change the scene outline document. But most importantly, we motivate one another. We check in and pat each other on the back. 

 And then we write in an attempt to impress the other. So figure out what your goals are. Determine what motivates you to type out that next sentence. Find your cheerleaders. And then write. 

 Don’t forget to love one another, 

 Graham