I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do a Novel writing month, but I have signed up for writingmonth.org with the idea that I want to write at least 10,000 words in my journal (this blog counts) and another 10,000 words at least for office work.
For office work, I’ll only count words I write in documents and not in emails or chat, simply because it’s easier to account for documents than for the latter two. WritingMonth.org is a small endeavor by 1 person actively and another contributing member in some capacity. So while I can reasonably expect the developer to respond quickly to feedback, what I do not expect is a mobile app and a browser plugin and an obsidian plugin, etc etc.
And in one sense it doesn’t even matter. The friction of manually entering my goals into a platform means that I’ll only do it if I’m genuinely going about the process. This same has been true for StoryGraph, where I’ve been tracking all the books I’ve been listening to. I manually plug in my read count daily, instead of relying onon, say, Goodreads and Kindle being integrated and doing it automatically for me.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I hanker for this kind of automation when I’m comfortable in my efforts. But when I’m starting out, it makes sense to do the process of tracking details manually. After all, there’s recollection in that task, and also intent. Only if I write and then plug in by word count into the web app will I see that meter fill up for that monthly word count. Only then will I get to see the satisfaction of knowing for sure that I’m doing something with my time and my life instead of simply… living it.