Tag: update

Winning NaNoWriMo!

Published on by Heart Full Of Books1 Comment

Although it’s the first day of Blogmas, and we’ll be getting Christmas-y tomorrow, don’t you worry, the start of December also means the end of NaNoWriMo. In thirty days, writers are challenged to get 50,000 words down of their book. That’s 1667 words a day. Bee and I definitely had it easier than most, halving the word count between us, but we thought writing 800 words a day was going to be a stretch after not writing consistently since July.

We’re so proud to say that with a lot of hard work and motivational hurdles, WE WROTE 50K! WE WON!! Throughout NaNo, we kept a chart of our word counts and we thought we’d run through some stats, because who doesn’t love some numbers?

Screen Shot 2017-11-29 at 10.17.15Highest Daily Word Count: 5,000 words (27th)
Lowest Daily Word Count: 300 words (6th)

Most Consecutive Writing Days: 7
Average Consecutive Days: 3
Total of Days Off Writing: 7

Weekly Writing Stats
1: 12.7K | 2: 11.7K | 3: 10K | 4: 13.3K | 5: 2.5K

Looking at the numbers, it’s really interesting to see which days were the hardest and when we thrived the most. Week 3 was definitely a kicker, but the sprint to the finish line made it entirely worth it! We’re so happy that we took part this year and finally prioritised writing after months of saying it was what we wanted to focus on. We wouldn’t have finished our first draft (sitting at 64K) without NaNoWriMo, and now we get the even more exciting task of editing…yay(?)

Congratulations to anyone else that won NaNo, and well done to anyone that took part because however many words you wrote, you’re that much closer to finishing a book!

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NaNoWriMo: Mid Month Check In!

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We’re just over the halfway point in NaNoWriMo, and today we should be at 30,000 words. That’s an insane number, and around where Bee and I both pulled out in 2015 (mostly because we hadn’t planned our novels further than that and just wanted to play Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer.)

This year, things are different.

We’re not quite at 30,000, but we’re chugging along after a couple days of not writing in favour of planning out a few more chapters (and watching the One Direction: This is Us documentary…it was research, we swear!) Our WIP overall is sitting at around 40,000 words so we’re getting into the tricky territory of The Middle, where ideas and motivation go to die.

Screen Shot 2017-11-18 at 09.45.54

To keep ourselves motivated, we created a MyWriteClub account to track our goals, and because an online version wasn’t enough in the form of the NaNo graph, we made a sticker chart to keep ourselves accountable. Different colour stars have different word count weights and an emerald star is the highest tier at 2,000 words.

Our most successful day was the 3rd, when we somehow managed to churn out 4.5K, followed by the 11th when we wrote 4K. Seeing gaps in the chart for the days we didn’t write does make me feel tragically sad, so it’s definitely working as far as encouraging us to make writing a daily practice.

Seriously, stickers are motivating as heck. Why didn’t we remember this from when we were kids? It’s a tried and tested method to success.

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So, overall, NaNoWriMo is going even better than planned because I thought we would have given up by now. I guess it just proves to me how passionate we are about telling this story together. It’s what I’d rather do than anything else, apart from a 1,000 piece piece puzzle. (That’s what another one of those days off was for. Sorry, not sorry.)

If you’re doing NaNo, keep going! Even if you’re not at the word count for hitting 50K, you’re still writing more than you would have if we weren’t doing it!

No Reading in November?

Published on by Heart Full Of Books2 Comments

It’s pretty obvious that our blog has been a little inactive this month. We’re two weeks into November and nothing bookish whatsoever has appeared! But, that’s all because of one thing: NaNoWriMo!

This month, Bee and I are both attempting to write 50,000 words of our current, individual YA projects. We’re almost on target for achieving the goal, and both have over 20,000 words down so far. It’s a big deal, and takes a lot of time that I’d usually spend reading out of my day, but it’s worth it.

We studying English Literature and Creative Writing at university. Writing essays and short pieces that fit our class briefs has become second nature to us, but it has meant we’ve sacrificed working on our own projects to do what’s demanded.

NaNoWriMo is so great because it gives you an excuse to make time for writing what you love, but in order to maintain our work schedules, we’ve had to sadly sacrifice reading as much as we’d like to in order to write.

And that’s not a bad thing. We’ll both have written whole novels by the time December rolls around! Speaking of which…

As per tradition, Bee and I will be participating in Blogmas. That means you can expect a post on Heart Full Of Books, every day for twenty five days, up until Christmas.We’re really excited to put time aside to give our blog some love, and anytime we’re not writing, reading for class or sleeping we plan to spend preparing to make this year’s Blogmas the best one yet!

If you’d like to check our progress on NaNoWriMo, check out our pages:
Maddie: here, and Bee: here!

If you want to see what we plan to read when NaNoWriMo is over and we can get back to the sweet world of books, check out our December TBR video!

Love, Maddie and Bee XOX

Update Time!

Published on by Heart Full Of Books2 Comments

As of yesterday, Bee and I started University. Like, actually started. Moved out, moved in, went to the welcome meetings. Unfortunately, the dawn of university means the death of my reading speed. So, I wanted to just warn you all that reviews may not be written and uploaded as frequently as they have been so far this year.

It’s strange, and new and different to anything else, but overall really, REALLY exciting. (Although I did have to spend over £30 on a textbook this morning and thought about crying.)

Onwards to read more university books….but less books in general. Yippee!

Update: Exams

Published on by Heart Full Of Books2 Comments

Hello, Lovely Readers!

We just wanted to thank everyone for viewing and liking our posts on our blog while we’ve been slightly absent! May 7th was our year anniversary, and since then, we haven’t been doing daily posts, like usual…as you may have noticed.

In the next few weeks, we have our A2 exams, which are the final exams we sit before we go to university in September. So, we’ve been super busy revising for those and that’s the reason why we haven’t been posting so much.

Of course, we’ve still been reading, but not really enough to read-and-review regularly. (Plus, we’ve been reading a lot of the same thing, which significantly decreasing the amount of review content we can produce!)

So, thank you for your continued support and patience as we’re on a small hiatus. We look forward to returning soon with more reviews, videos and other content! (Because when we do return, it will be summer! and we’ll be FREE!)

Love,
Maddie and Bee xx