I Learned Something

Photo by Kim van Vuuren on Pexels

Remember how like two years ago I said I don't like changing targets mid-year? And then a year after that, I changed the way I counted progress on one of my goals, so that I wouldn't have to change it, because there had been a calculation error? Well, this year, I'm changing two goals, six weeks from the end of the tracking period. 

A lot of writers talk about needing to read in order to write. Most will talk about this in terms of the benefits of learning technique, or, more cynically and less productively, keeping track of market trends. A few talk about how writing without reading is like trying to only exhale without ever inhaling. That's a pretty good metaphor. A couple years back I redid the way I calculate my reading and writing time goals to make them always equal, and that was a pretty important step. But over the past couple of years, I've discovered two other significant correlations. I can only write about as many words of fiction a year as I read pages of fiction, and I can only write about 10% as many blog posts as I read. By the time most of you see this, the targets on the progress bars will have changed, but by that metric, my goals for reading books and blogs this year were barely and less than half of what was necessary, respectively, to actually accomplish what I meant to in terms of writing those things. The original targets were 32357 pages read, and 223 blog posts, if you want to run the numbers yourself, and apparently at some point I tried to fix this with a smaller adjustment because my spreadsheet shows a target of 35357 pages read instead. 

I seriously considered just leaving the goals as they were until the end of September, and talking about this when I created new goals for 2024-2025, but honestly, that's too long to be behind and kind of needlessly struggling on some of the most important, most visible, work I do. I'm still gonna be behind. There's more catchup to do, on both the reading necessary to do my work and the actual doing of it, to accomplish in like six weeks. But part of what we do around here is learning in public, and I don't think any of you were watching my progress so closely that your lives will be seriously disrupted by this change. To avoid common factor issues, I'm starting from the basic formulae indicated by the new information, and adding a d100 and d10 respectively, so the new goals will be 60,099 pages read, and 577 blog posts read. We'll see how it goes I guess. 

Next post will be Dresden Files. It might take me a little longer to get to The Very Next Post, but I promise in the long run this change will benefit the quality and speed of updates around here.