The Milwordy Challenge is almost upon us! What kind of a word is Milwordy, you ask? It is the wreckage of two words colliding with the sound of our sanity imploding.
The Milwordy Challenge is what we’re calling an attempt to write one million words in a single year.
This started over on the AuthorTuber Kate Cavanaugh’s channel. She’d recently taken the James Patterson Masterclass, and she was inspired by something he apparently says in the class.
The gist of it is that you need to write one million bad words before your writing starts to improve.
Kate decided she wanted to try and get those million words done within a year. And she invited the rest of us with very little sanity to join her in this venture.
Here’s what it would take to complete the Milwordy Challenge:
Every Month: 83,333 words
Every Week: 19,230 words
Every Day: 2,741 words
Every *Work Day: 3,831 words
*Work Day as defined by the US government with weekends and a few holidays off.
Isn’t that insane? To put that into perspective, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) only asks for people to write 50,000 words in a month. And only a pretty small percentage of NaNoWriMo participants win every year.
Milwordy requires you to do a NaNoWriMo and a half every single month.
I would fail miserably within the first month if I attempted to complete the full Milwordy challenge. However, I think I can do a Half-Milwordy, or write 500,000 words in a year.
Here’s the breakdown of what a Half- Milwordy would look like.
Every Month: 41,667 words
Every Week: 9,615 words
Every Day: 1,369 words
Every *Work Day: 1,915 words
That’s only a bit more than I have been doing for the last few months, and I know I will be entering revision stages for Project Grey, which will mean that I have a whole lot more words I can count (close to 100,000 all on its own).
A Half-Milwordy is achievable for me, so I created my own spreadsheet to track my word counts. I’ve been using it in August, just to get a base line for how much I usually write in each of my projects and types of writing (fiction, non-fiction, journaling, etc.).
Here’s what my tracker looks like.
If you are interested in having a copy of the spreadsheet, here is my Milwordy (or Half-Milwordy) Challenge Tracker. WARNING: It will create a Google sheet copy for your own Google Drive.
If you are interested in Kate’s original video, Click HERE. You will find a sign-up link in the video description if you are interested in participating (it allows you to define your own year-long goal) and receiving data on the group statistics.
The challenge starts on September 1st, 2020 and will run until August 31st, 2021.
Wish me luck!
Jules the Dawdling Writer
August 2020 Writing Challenge Week 3 will be live 8/27/2020 at 10 AM Eastern.
The Dawdling Writer 