#ROW80 - Round 2 Final

I'm going to do my final check-in today. I know we have one more official day left, but we're going on vacation from tomorrow until Tuesday. Thus, not a whole lot is going to be done, though I do plan to try and right a bit during the long car ride. I'm lucky that I can write pretty much anywhere, and road trips are a lot of down time.

First, let's look at how the goals wrapped up this week:

• Lesson Learned - I'll call this a reinforcement of a previous lesson. I talked about Word of Mouth this week, and several articles have mentioned how key this is in the world of electronic books. It can be difficult to generate and predict, but it can also be very powerful.
• WIP Progress - I hammered out 8 pages and finished the first chapter this week. Hooray! Now hopefully it's worth a damn. Or two damns, which, last time I checked damn to dollar conversion rates, is about $3.99.
• Blogging - Blogging about gaming continues to be rough for me. Not surprising as this is the typical summer slump. I, like most, are doing more outdoorsy things, which limits my play time. Less playtime means less content. I only put up 1 post there, but I offset it a bit with 4 posts here and knocked out my personal post as well. So, really, I still did 6 posts this week.
• Reading - We're in our final week of the group read. It's been a lot of fun. I'll probably look to get into more in the future. Seems a great way to connect with other folks that enjoy the same books that I do.

That's not bad. This round was a bit all over the place with releasing two works and starting my next project. I did a lot of editing. I got swamped in my Day Job and struggled to put out posts. I wrote while on a week long work trip. But I wrote. There were still words put down, and that's what matters.

I added a reading goal this round. It started as a "not" goal, but I think I'm going to keep it going in the future. Reading is an important part of any writer's process. I should own up to that and set goals for it.

The end of this round coincides with the start of a short vacation for me. I'll celebrate, and then probably write about celebrating. The next round starts on July 2nd, so if you're looking to join a great group of writers (or you're already part of the ROWing crew), see you then!

I'll conclude this round with a final word count, and we'll look at how it's stacked up against previous rounds. I expect it to be lower, since the bulk of the round was spent editing.

• Since last check in: 5,507
• New Fiction: 2,269
• Round 2 Total: 37,849

Previous rounds:

•  Round 1 2012 Total: 47,287
• Round 4 2011 Total: 61,097
• Round 3 2011 Total: 69,375
• ROW80 Words Written: 215,608 in 320 days, for a 674 words/day average.

For next round, I'll be in writing mode the whole time. I need to push myself and bring that average back up. I think, overall, I'd like to average 750 words/day. Also, it may look like my word counts are trending down (they are), but these last two rounds didn't have a solid project to carry them. I'd look for Round 3, 2012 to pick it back up. At least, that is the goal... and it's good to have goals.