First Published: 2023 May 3
Twice a year, the website I’ve been self publishing my web serials on has a competition: write 55,555 words in 5 weeks. The latest one began this year on the first of April, and I set a variety of goals related to it. As I mentioned in my last writing post, I wanted to write more words each day that I wrote. That goal didn’t end up panning out, though I did end up still writing 78010 words in April.1
Another goal I had was posting a chapter for the new book every day at 2:08 PM CST until I hit the word count for the challenge. I accomplished that, though I did become far looser on my personal idiolectal usage of hyphens.2
I also had the goal of maintaining my 3/week schedule of the book I had started before Writathon. I accomplished that.
I had the goal of completing Writathon, which I tangentially answered as having done above. To be clear, i did it.
Finally, I had a goal of learning to write combat scenes. I still don’t know if I’m fantastic at it, but I think that the scenes I wrote were at least serviceable.
I certainly feel like I grew a lot as a writer, if only in terms of learning to write content I am willing to put out into the world faster. Partially that was lowering my standards, but I also think that I grew a lot as a writer in terms of thinking in a way that transfers to the page more easily. These past few days in particular, I noticed that I was restarting sentences two or three times as I saw how they wouldn’t end correctly. Historically, I would have needed to reread the entire chapter to notice that mistake.
So, while I’m still unsure if I plan to do Writathon ever again, I’m certainly glad that I took part in it. If I can maintain my average of over 27003 words every day that I write4, I think that it would remain a very doable activity.
where I only counted text that I physically wrote as content for chapters, one book review, and the occasional blog posts. I didn’t include titles, the cases where I have macros defined for words (I use tables that have “Congratulations!” in them often enough that it seemed worthwhile to define a table that says congratulations), or any other writing I needed to do for life and whatnot↩︎
read: I stopped using hyphens because brain-dead is one word but brain dead is two↩︎
holy crud that’s a lot of words (also this post technically counts towards the average. It was 2740 before posting this, and would be 2755 after↩︎
basically 6 days per week↩︎