I’ve decided to take a little time out from writing for a little retrospective on yesterday. My goal for today isn’t too high anyway, 5050 words to take me up to 55,555 is the first aim, so I can afford to leave of writing until late this afternoon. And since yesterday is still very much in my mind I decided to have a little look back, starting with the numbers.
| Time | Target | Actual | Surplus | Change | Today |
| 14:00:00 | 35,000 | 35,133 | 133 | 1,090 | 1,090 |
| 15:00:00 | 36,250 | 36,810 | 560 | 1,677 | 2,767 |
| 16:00:00 | 37,500 | 38,663 | 1,163 | 1,853 | 3,530 |
| 17:00:00 | 38,750 | 40,416 | 1,666 | 1,753 | 6,373 |
| 18:00:00 | 40,000 | 42,302 | 2,302 | 1,886 | 8,259 |
| 19:00:00 | 40,000 | 42,524 | 2,524 | 222 | 8,481 |
| 20:00:00 | 41,250 | 43,800 | 2,550 | 1,276 | 9,757 |
| 21:00:00 | 42,500 | 45,554 | 3,054 | 1,754 | 11,511 |
| 22:00:00 | 43,750 | 47,255 | 3,505 | 1,701 | 13,212 |
| 23:00:00 | 45,000 | 48,784 | 3,784 | 1,529 | 14,741 |
| 23:59:59 | 46,250 | 50,505 | 4,255 | 1,721 | 16,462 |
As you can see I kept track of my progress hour by hour yesterday. I knew I wanted to get a good deal done, hence a minimum aim of 1250 per hour – 250 ever ten minutes with a ten minute break in every hour. I managed to overshoot that, which is why I ended up doing 16k rather than the 12k I’d planned for.
The first 1k or so was scraped together in a couple of mini sessions in the morning, and a 300 word block right before 14:00. And from there on everything just came together. Somehow the pace kept going up, so much so that even when I took half an hour longer than I’d meant to for dinner I still managed to get over 1250 for that hour (or to be precise that half hour from 19:30 until 20:00), which kept me pretty comfortably ahead thanks to some words I couldn’t resist writing the hour before.
In the end that got me the big 50k by 23:40, leaving me a comfortable 500 words in 20 minutes to finish on an even prettier wordcount (and get the required margin, should the verification counter be very mean this year). So why this post? Well partly because this is the perfect example of a day where everything went right, partly to brag, and partly because it gives me an excuse to play with yesterday’s stats again. Can you blame me for that?
[...] NaNoWriMo 2008 – Day Eight Retrospective      [...]
This may be due to my abysmal relationship with numbers, but could you explain the last two columns, please? If I squint at them with my head perched to the right side, I seem to be in reach of an understanding, but it disappears as soon as I reach out for it.
Change is just the score for the preceding hour. Today is the daily total at that point.
Ohhhh … I got it. Thanks.