Idiot's Log

Hello class, specifically the dreamwidth section. I am, as the above title suggests, in the midst of undertaking a challenge.

I, as you will come to find out if you don't know already, am insane. So in 2026, I have chosen to embark upon a journey of writing one million words in a calendar year. What exactly does that mean?

All non-correspondence writing counts.

For my purposes all of the following will count as words: prose (fan fiction and original works), poetry, academic and administrative work, meta analysis, and these daily update posts, among other words that I see as productive. Basically, anything that would count as words for the LU Community Write-A-Thon. …Almost.

Almost, because as I previously said, I will only be counting non-correspondence writing. This means that I shall not count answering comments on fic or tumblr asks, nor shall I count sending asks nor writing comments on fics. Nor will I count commenting of dreamwidth posts or direct messages of any mind. These are all valuable uses of my time that I will continue to do, but they do not fit into my idea of what a successful completion of this challenge will look like.

As for metrics, and progress tracking, I have to give a huge shout-out to Mina (@zarvasace on Tumblr) for making tools like the personal day and monthly word count trackers (available for download on the LUWAT site) that I then modified to serve my specific use case.

Every day, I shall post an update to the relevant monthly tracker, and optionally the document log which will show what documents I am working on and their current word counts. Each emoji is a different project, and the cases where the same emoji is present in multiple spots with numbers beside it mean that I am references separate chapters of the same project, as I hold those in separate ellipsus drafts.

I shall also be periodically posting an update to this page which concatenates all of my months into one stat page, as you can see below.

(And while those pictures are currently blanks the live documents are not, I will shown you later!)

One million words in a year is a par of 83.3k words a month, or 2,474 words every day. At the time of this post's drafting I am about two days behind schedule exactly, which is really not bad considering I took like half a week off to boot up not only this account but the Retro Writing Month event.

Wish me luck, I'll be back with the day's total as often as I remember to be.