Day 92: I love 4thewords!

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I mentioned yesterday about using the website/game 4thewords.com to gamify my writing, and today I had a great writing day! I got a little under 5000 words done, and while it took me longer than it would have by dictation, they’re very clean, so I won’t need to spend much time editing them later.

I’m not sure why, but I really love doing the quests in the game and figuring out how to fulfill the different quests and craft different weapons and armor. I’ve basically been doing lots of sprints throughout the day and the words kept piling up.

My words per hour rate isn’t very high—between 1300 and 1500 words per hour. It’s nice that the words are clean and don’t need much editing, but I would really like to increase that to 2000 or 2500 words per hour.

Part of the reason my writing is a little slow is that I haven’t been spending much time doing blocking for the scenes before I write them. I’m wondering if maybe I should take the time to do the blocking, even though a part of me feels like it’s more time I have to spend on the scene before I even write it. It might end up being worth it if my words per hour rate increases thanks to the blocking.

Anyway, if you’d like to give 4thewords a try, you can use this promo code to get a few free crystals: WQCFL76961 along with their 30-day free trial period. Crystals are what you buy (via PayPal) in order to buy their subscription (which is $4 a month or a little less than $40 a year).

Time spent writing: 4 hours, 50 minutes
Total number of words: 4799 words
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 45 minutes

My takeaway for today: Short sprints work! Gamifying the writing seems to work for me, too!

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