Before going to bed, felt important to hand-write some words debriefing our PiBoWriMo kick-off call.
Really appreciated the word count gauge as a temperature check for how each author envisioned progressing throughout the month. Although these figures were vague and may fluctuate wildly, even throwing a number out there gave a sense of hardness to the call that I didn’t anticipate.
What was particularly interesting to throw out (and apparently got stuck) was an intention to cut 4000 words per day from an initial 5:1 ratio of generation:reduction, to press on the fact that AI is going to play a major part in my workflow, while mildly influenced by folks anchoring on 1000 words per day. As the call ended, I immediately felt it was worth halving that figure and focusing on hand-written idea generation to start, while respecting the original 5:1 ratio. Say 500 words written here, edited down to 100 words later on.
Although I feel a bit out of my depth, I’m feeling quite lucky to be working alongside published writers that have gone through the process intimately enough to know what works while I’m monstrously experimenting on the edges. I also think we have a couple of folks doing visual-based books to punctuate the wordy soup, which is nice. Feeling a bit bashful at the fact that I probably came off as a plucky ambitious youngster on the initial call, but I know I came here to level up my thinking by putting in the rigor to explain ideas more thoroughly and interestingly.
Alright, tomorrow I think it might be fun to dig up material on alternative numbering systems. Also worth structuring the examples I noted over the past week on the distinction between literacy and numeracy. This morning’s fragment was worth running through that exercise on its own.
(Also ht to Jenna for reminding about the meeting notes transcript: need to look back on threading in the pibowrimo channel and updating the word count on the PI website)