Nano Update #3

Okay, I feel like I don't have a whole lot to say today, so let's spice things up by taking a look at the old leader board.  This might be (mildly) interesting to those of you who don't NaNo, and therefore don't know what, exactly, we're looking at every day, staring at us, mocking us.

 



So, this is a snapshot of my graph as of today.  Obviously, the x-axis is the number of days and the y-axis is the wordcount.  The gray line represents what you need to make par (1667 words per day, or enough to make up that amount.)  The brown bars represent what you actually typed.

So what are we looking at in my particular case?  Well, as you can see I basically made par or just barely over every day for the first week.  Day 7, the first Saturday of the month, represents my turnaround.  (Duh, it was a Saturday, I had time to write.)  Day 8 the lead improved, and things went swimmingly up until the 13th, which as I've mentioned before was the Friday when I only managed to knock out about 800 words. 

The 14th and 15th (Satuday and Sunday again) were two more banner days and put me back on track.  The only other day since the 13th when I failed to make par was yesterday, Day 22, when I wrote about 1300 words.  It doesn't really matter at this point unless I completely lay down on the job, because I'm at about 43,000 words and par for the 23rd is 38,000.  I'm not exactly setting the world on fire but I'm a scoche ahead.

The only other interesting thing on this chart is the flatline from yesterday to today.  If it's not otherwise obvious, that's because I haven't written any words yet today.  But I will (barring any unforeseen circumstances) so the bar graph shouldn't remain like that.

Here's a look at the stats the NaNo website provides us with:

In some ways this is more interesting than the chart.  In other ways it's less interesting.  For instance, knowing that I average 1881 words would indicate that I slightly overachieved.  It doesn't reflect the two days I fell down on the job and the four days (all weekends, I might add) when I excelled.  And, again, this chart is a bit skewed because it considers the amount I wrote today as 0, rather than, say, projecting what I'll probably write today.  Which means my actual average is probably a bit higher, etc., etc.

What is interesting about this stat bar is it always tells you your estimated rate to finish and the words per day to finish on time.  So if I had some crazy banner year and pounded out 10,000 words a day, it'd guess I'd be done by November 5.  A lot of people, of course, fall behind NaNo, and let it really affect them.  I've never been in that boat, so I don't want to be preachy, but the nice thing about NaNo is that it never rules you out.  Let's say I had only written 6000 words by today. 

He he, I just plugged that in and the result is pretty hilarious.  It projects that at my current rate I won't finish until May 11, 2016.  (Hey, that's what I get for only writing 260 words a day.)  But more to the point, it tells me I can still win if I write 5500 words a day for the next week.  I mean, that's daunting, that's especially daunting to me since I've never written that many words in a day before, but the NaNo bots never count me out.  I think that's pretty cool, all things considered.

All right, so, again, barring Fate deciding to make an ass of me, I should be well and truly finished in the next few days, with plenty of time to give you guys a full report on how I ended my run on next Monday's update.  See you then!