Story-A-Day Retrospective: Times and Word Counts

Continuing my retrospective:

During the work week, I always wrote in the evening.  Mornings for Saturdays, and Sundays were a crapshoot, with me writing anywhere in the day (but usually not first thing in the morning).  Looking back, I felt better about most of my Saturday writing, but maybe that was because I wasn't under a time crunch, nor did I constrain myself as much for word-count (due to not having the time crunch).

Because of that, I'd expected my Saturday pieces in particular to be both longer and better, and somewhat for Sunday as well.  However, when I choose my current favorite stories (detailed later), only only half of them were written during the weekend.  That's a higher output per number of days, but less than I had expected.  Also, my two favorites (so far) were written on a worknight.

Word count also tells an interesting tale.  It turns out that Thursday nights were my best for number of words, with an average of 1956.  That was followed closely by Saturday with 1839, then Sunday (1645), Wednesday (1635), Friday (1549), Tuesday (1512), and finally Monday (1477).  Obviously some variability, but I showed I can regularly crunch out an average of over 1650 words a day for a month when writing shorter pieces, which is just a hair less than a winning NaNoWriMo pace.

Continuing to look at word counts, my longest (fully completed) story was 3693 words, on the first day.  My shortest was on the fourth day, with 771.  (Neither what I expected when I started reviewing, though I knew both were in the mix).  On only three days did I have less than 1k words for a story.

The reason I mentioned (fully completed) above was that three times, in the middle of the story, I decided that it was going too long and that I had to resort to summarizing the rest of the story in order to get to an "ending".  Currently, those sit at 2494 words, 2725 words, and 1409 words.  By the last one, I obviously decided faster that I had to summarize.  I'll declare that an improvement for this month's exercise, calling it better knowledge of the short story effort, rather than me being lazier.  It might have been both.

July Goal the First

My first (writing) goal during July is to continue the writing streak I've started in June.  I wasn't writing as consistently as I'd like prior to June, and since I managed to write each and every day in June, I plan on trying to do the same during July.

The goal is at least 250 words a day.  Why 250?  Because I also signed up for the Magic Spreadsheet online at the beginning of June, and 250 words is the minimum to keep a writing streak going.

They have to be new words.

However, that is the only limit I'm placing on the goal.  The words can be part of an existing story, to flesh it out.  They can be part of a brand-new story.  They can be about writing (like this blog post, or critiques), though I'm going to try to keep those down.  The cannot be words I wrote for work, because that would just be silly.  They just have to be new words, trying to further my writing in some way.

Two days done so far.