Hello Readers! Clevenger here again, greeting you from the Midwest! With NaNoWriMo in full swing, Graham and I were talking about our writing progress and how we’ve tracked it over the course of this project. We thought it might be fun to talk over how we each track our progress, share that together, and use it to set and enforce our individual goals. 

When we first sat down in 2019, Graham had significantly more experience as a writer. I had tried a few times to take part in NaNoWriMo, but without a simple plan or a strong narrative objective, I would stare frustrated at a Word Count goal that was far outside of my abilities. Fear and anxiety would take hold and I would never progress beyond one or two thousand words. 

But when we started Manticore’s Shadow, I didn’t write. I planned. I would bounce world ideas and visualize magic and craft character arcs, and feed them to Graham. He would shape and mold them and bring them to life on the page. Slowly my “visuals” were expanding into small scene snippets, and then the expanded again into full scenes, and suddenly I was writing alongside my friend. By Spring of 2020, we had about 20,000 words and felt pretty good about it.

But as the novel became a tangible project and not a “pipe-dream” my Project Management brain took hold. I needed milestones and goals. I needed a plan. (Day jobs, am I right?) I established an overall goal of 70,000 words for the novel, and gave us a generous goal of Christmas of 2021. It seemed easily achievable and wouldn’t put undue stress on either Graham or me.

When we completed the first draft in July of 2021, we were shocked! Nearly 83,000 words and six months early, we had completed it! We celebrated and boasted to friends and family and were SO PROUD!! And then we remembered we have three more books in this project. What now?

But our plan had held true, so let’s build a plan for the rest. 

Graham and I work different. So to help us each, we discussed the overall goal and the timeline. We decided to see what it would take to get all books completed by Winter of 2022. We raised our goals to 90K works per book and looked to see the plan.

I created a spreadsheet to do the math. What would my week look like to complete the Stories of Sainan?

I put in our Goal, the Current Count and the Goal Date. A quick formula to determine the number of words remaining (GOAL – COUNT) and viola! I know what’s left. I then use a formula to calculate the number of days remaining from today to the goal date. Divide the words remaining by the number of days and I have a “Book Daily Goal” to tell me the number of words per day we needed. I then multiplied the Daily goal by 7 and formed my “Book Weekly Goal.” (I have included the math at the end of this post)

Since Graham and I are partners, I divided the Weekly in half and was now given the words per week I needed to succeed. When we saw the average weekly goal was less than we expected, we pushed our writing deadlines up so that we could put more work in editing and rewrites and still meet our publication deadline. As you can see, less than 2500 words per week allow us to achieve our first draft of Book 4 by July 2022! (NaNoWriMo goals are 1667 per day!!!). 

I also made a chart to keep a “visual” of our progress, to help keep me motivated. 

Using these charts, I found that achieving this MASSIVE goal was much easier than I ever realized. I overcame my intimidation and instead had a plan of attack that was well within my abilities. With just one or two scenes a week, we would become the authors of our very own fantasy series! 

Graham will release his post on how he tracks his progress later this week! Keep reading, and I hope that this inspires other fledgling authors (like us) to motivate themselves and make their dreams a reality!

Be kind.

E

FORMULAS:

For those that would like a bit of behind the scenes on how to create their own spreadsheet.

I use Google Sheets. Here is a sample of Revelations of Shadow (the book we are working on at the time of this post) and how the math works.

D1: Title (Type the name of your book)

D2: Word Goal (Type the number you are looking to achieve.)

D3: Current Count (Type the number you currently have in your book)

D4: Percent Complete  =D3/D2 

D5: BLANK

D6: Word Remaining =D2-D3 

D7: Goal Date (Type in the date you want to finish by)

D8: Days remaining =D7-TODAY()

D9: Book Daily Goal (Words per Day) =D6/D8

D10: Book Weekly Goal (Words per Week) =D9*7

D11: Individual Weekly Goal =D10/2 

**D11 is because thankfully I have a co-author to help!!!