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I officially started Week 7 of the Couch to 80k workshop I’ve been doing. Definitely a little late, but I took two weeks off for the holidays. It’s been a little bit more difficult to get back into the routine again of sitting down everyday to listen to the podcast, but I need to do it. Once I get it going, it’ll be easier to translate toward writing.

I’ve made the goal of writing 240,000 words this year. I have no idea if this is doable. I don’t know how many words I wrote last year, but at least 120,000. Doubling that should be interesting. In an amusing and rare misstep in mental math, I for some reason convinced myself this equaled 2000 words a month. It wasn’t until I sat down and realized why this seemed wrong that I was missing a zero.

20,000 words a month is definitely a challenge from what I’ve been writing, but much easier than the Nano months I did twice. If I look at it by week, it’s 4616 words each week. By day, it’s 658. I’ll get there. I’ll have to push myself, but I’ll get there.

I haven’t officially written anything yet so far, which will come to bite me in the ass later this month. It’s surprisingly hard to write outside of the workshop, so I’m going to wait until I’m completely done with Couch to 80k before writing separately. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll count the words written during those exercises, but I probably will. They might not be words toward a novel, but they’re words I’ve written. They still count.

Reading

My reading goal this year is 90 books. According to what I accounted for on Goodreads, I read 65 last year, but there were many I didn’t count. My actual goal was 70, but I was sucked into a manga series that has 19 volumes. In order to count each volume as a book, but still keep my original goal for novels, I upped the number to account for those volumes. As of right now, I’m at 21% of the total goal. 

The manga series I read over the last week was Banana Fish. The next book I’m going to read is Promises Linger by Sarah McCarty. I’ve been hunting for this book for years and finally bit the bullet and purchased it for my Kindle. I can’t wait.

I’m hoping to post writing and reading updates once a week. It’ll help me keep this blog current and hold myself accountable for my goals. Now, to finally create that WIP page…

^{Photo by Clint McKoy on Unsplash.}