One of my goals this year is to actually succeed at NanoWriMo in November. I'm planning on taking two days off that month, so if I write 1,000 words on weekdays and 3,000 on weekends or days off, I should be able to make it. Now, on most days I can't even get three hundred words done, let alone three thousand, so I've decided to engage in a sort of 'training program' where I write progressively more words each week. I've tried to do stuff like this before, but I've finally managed to actually follow a schedule for the past two weeks, which is why I'm posting about it now. The secret sauce that allowed me to stick to the schedule? Low standards. Very, very, low standards. For the week of 4/2 to 4/8, my goal was to write 25 words on weekdays, and 75 words on weekends, and for the week of 4/9 to 4/15, my goal was to write 50 words on weekdays, and 150 words on weekends. Here's how I did:
4/02: 29 words.
4/03: 50 words of working on my story, and also 309 words of fanfiction review.
4/04: 27 words.
4/05: 42 words.
4/06: 47 words.
4/07: 137 words.
4/08: 562 words.
4/09: 54 words.
4/10: 51 words.
4/11: 147 words.
4/12: 175 words.
4/13: 106 words.
4/14: 167 words.
4/15: 844 words.
All of those words were for the same story, Skitty's Vlog. The story behind Skitty's Vlog is that originally I wanted to work on a big magnum opus PMD fic, but then I decided to work on something I could actually finish first, so I started writing a prequel to it, called 'I Sold My Soul to Victini and All I Won Was This Stupid Championship', two chapters of which are up on this site. But then I realized that the prequel would actually have to get pretty long to do its main concept justice, so I decided to work on a shorter project first. That was a fic called 'Some Average Days in a Pokemon Daycare', the idea being that it'd be sort of an episodic series where every chapter would be a self-contained story, so I could just put out a chapter of it whenever I got tired of working on longer projects. But after getting up to 7,956 words on the first chapter and counting, I decided I needed to work something even shorter still.
'Skitty's Vlog', is, as the title suggests, the vlog of a very cynical Skitty, who discusses various topics of interest to Pokemon in the modern world. Similarly to 'Some Average Days in a Pokemon Daycare', the idea is that I can just publish short episodes of this whenever I get tired of working on longer stuff. One of the issues with 'Daycare' I kept running into was that sometimes there'd be a Sentence That Just Wasn't Right, and I'd spend like half an hour endlessly trying to rephrase it and it Still Wouldn't Be Right, which did not do wonders for my writing speed. The idea with Skitty's Vlog is that basically it's just a cat talking on the internet, so sometimes she (or he, haven't really decided on a gender yet) says stuff which is kind of oddly worded, but that's okay, because not everything people say in real life sounds exactly right.
Anyways, the first episode of the vlog is Skitty discussing a topic of interest to many Pokemon: How to find a good trainer. I finished the section on what qualities make a trainer good a while ago, and today I finished the segment talking about where to find good trainers, so now I just have to do the bit where Skitty talks about how to actually get someone to let you on their team - not an easy task if you're a zubat or bidoof or whatever.
This week, I'm planning to write 100 words every weekday and 300 words on the weekend, so I'll make another post next Sunday with my results. (Hopefully someone else will have posted in the interim by then; if not, I'll wait until someone does to avoid double-posting.)