Melissa-ish Monday: Word Count

Melissa-ish Monday

"Word Count"

I'm back to working on my YA contemp now that I'm done with Book 3 in my fantasy series. Yay! I'm trying to keep myself accountable to write every day. It's a difficult thing to do. I have a lot of other things on my plate (being a wife, mom, volunteer, substitute teacher...) and taking the time to write sometimes feels like I'm stealing time and attention away from those other things. BUT I'm making myself do it. What do this mean? Well, maybe not playing Candy Crush for twenty minutes and using that time to write. Not being lost on the interwebz looking for cool Tumblr posts. Not staring out the window, thinking about the plot in the story. Just writing. I read somewhere that if you can just write four pages a day, that would equal about 1,000 words a day. That's 30,000 words in a month (okay, take off the weekends and you still have about 22,000 words!) In three months, you'd have a novel. It's similar to the NaNoWriMo challenge but not so crazy.

So, here I am being accountable. Current word count for YA contemp novel: 38,070. Each week I'll give my current word count. (I'm keeping track in an Excel spreadsheet so I can see when I'm most productive. Keeping track of times and where I'm writing will help that. Example: Starbucks - 9-10 a.m. 900 words., Home office - 8-9 p.m. 1,200 words.) <---- made up situation

How about you? Do you keep track of how many words you write? Does it matter to you?