Family History Writing Challenge – Week 4

It’s the last day of the challenge and time for my final report.  And even though this was a super-busy week for me, I still managed to get in four out of seven days of writing.  Let’s see how the last week went.

On Friday and Saturday (the 22nd and 23rd), I continued to write about my Schwartz family, this time focusing on Ferdinand, my third great-grandfather.  Friday’s word count was 280 and Saturday’s was 208, both just above my 200 words per day goal.

Crazy week ensued and no writing (well not for the challenge anyway) was done from Sunday through Tuesday.  By Wednesday, my plans changed a little bit and I managed to get my draft done for the next Surname Saturday post.  This post will be on my Stoffel family (which will be post on March 1) and was 731 words.

Today, being the last day, I had to make sure to squeeze in some time to get some writing done.  I switched my focus from the Schwartz family to the Kremer family.  They are connected by marriage and both families are from Luxembourg.  Since I plan on doing some sort of project with these Luxembourg families, it was nice to get a good start on the writing and also see where I need to focus future research.

Week 4 yielded a total of 1,478 words, which is just above the weekly goal of 1,400.  This was my lowest weekly word count for the entire month.  But it’s better than 0 words, right?

Overall, I think I did pretty well for the month.  I intended to write everyday, but that didn’t always work out.  But in the end, I still accomplished quite a bit.

Here’s what my stats look like for the month:

	# of Days I Wrote	# of Words I Wrote	# of Hours I Spent
Week 1	2	1,739	7*
Week 2	4	4,417	6
Week 3	5	2,574	3.75
Week 4	4	1,478	2.5
Total	15	10,208	19.25

*Included quite a bit of research time.

I think that’s pretty good.  Over 10,000 words in 15 days.  Not bad considering my goal for the month was 5,600…I wrote double that in half the time!  But imagine what I could have done in 28 days…maybe next year’s challenge will be different.

For me, this challenge was about trying to get in as much writing as I could, but more importantly, I wanted to track everything I did for the challenge.  By tracking the project, the number of words, and the number of hours, it gives me a better idea on what tasks can be done and how long they will probably take so that I can better plan out my week from both a work and personal perspective.  It also helps me get an idea about word count and time for certain types of writing projects, which is helpful in planning submissions for publication or better estimating my client writing projects.

Now that the challenge is over, how did you do?  Did you accomplish what you set out to do?  Did you learn anything from the experience?  I’d love to hear about your accomplishments and/or learnings, so please leave me a comment, even if it’s just a link to your blog post about your challenge experience.