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Terie Garrison’s bright idea of a one-month “race” to keep us motivated in the otherwise uninspiring month of February…she and I did this last summer (August can also be One of Those Months).
You can watch progress at her LiveJournal–she’s got the graphics up at the head of her journal, and because we’re each reporting in our own time zones, the graphic may be a day behind. ( It is, as I post this. ) The up-to-the-minute wordage posts are on Terie’s newsgroup at SFF.net. To read there, if you’re not a member (at least several of the contestants are), go to http://webnews.sff.net/ and sign in as a guest. You’ll browse to find her newsgroup: sff.people.terie-garrison.
The idea is that each writer chooses a word goal for the month–large or small, doesn’t matter. Those picking the longest goal have no multiplier–the words you see are the real words reported. Those with shorter goals have a multiplier to compensate for the “long” goal.
Comment by Chris — February 14, 2011 @ 10:35 am
Heh. This sounds a lot like NaNoWriMo. 🙂
Comment by elizabeth — February 14, 2011 @ 11:10 am
Not really. Everyone sets his/her own goal for the month, then the race organizer does the math to give the “slower” (less ambitious) writers an adjustment to their actual words produced, so they can “race” with those whose goals are higher. In this instance, the most ambitious writers settled on 30,000 words as the goal. Those whose goals were less had their actual words counted as more for race purposes, depending on what fraction of 30,000 they’d chosen as goal. The present leader has a goal of 25,000, and actual words are counted as 1.2 x actual. Several others (including me) have a goal of 30,000, and the others have chosen shorter goals. It’s not about writing a novel; at least one person’s goal was a short story. But because of the adjustments, we can all race on the same track (where the counter is concerned) and that makes it more interesting.
NoNoWriMo considers only actual words; there’s no handicapping (and no cute horse-racing graphic.)