that's a lot of words, dude

So I've been sorting out my writing stats the past couple of days.

I made a sheet tracking my weekly stats, based off the daily stats, and I collected the monthly stats into neat little boxes and... aside from NaNoWriMo last year, there's never been (as far as I've been tracking) a month I've written more than 30k words. Which makes me go *hmm*, about doing NaNoWriMo again.

Like, I'm averaging at about 20k words/month right now, and instead of jumping right into doing 50k for NaNo, I kind of want to just... incrementally increase my stats.

Like, winning NaNo last year made no difference. It's an outlier; I slid right back down to 20k the following month. It was worth it in the sense that it proved that I *can* write that much in a month, without a doubt. But it didn't last.

So. I had planned to do NaNo again this Nov but that was before I put all the stats together. I'm thinking, honestly, that it might be better to try to incrementally increase my monthly writing numbers until I can get somewhere around 50k consistently.

At the very least, my goal for this month is to write 5k words/week. My weekly writing stats are averaging at 4k words/week, so that seems reasonable.

Then next month, instead of doing NaNo, I'll try for 6k words/week? And if I succeed at that, I'll try doing 7k words/week in December?

Frankly that seems less bonkers than NaNo. NaNoWriMo is just a very bonkers idea and like, it's fun and all, but it's not sustainable to jump from 25k a month to 50k. I need high numbers that last, not a one-hit wonder.

This bears further thinking.