The Family History Writing Challenge started on February 1, and I am off to a rocky start…well sort of. Here’s the scoop for the first week.
On February 1, I wrote my blog post for the Surname Saturday theme, Surname Saturday: Rottman (Bavaria / Georgia / Iowa / Illinois). It was 938 words (4.69% of my 200 words/day goal—hey, I’m ahead of the game!!) and took two hours of writing and formatting. So it looked like I was off to a great start.
Then the weekend came, as did a stomach bug (that I’m still battling), so nothing got done. By Tuesday, I was working on a blog post for the Family History Through the Alphabet theme. Unfortunately, it really didn’t have anything to do with writing about my family history. I spent two days and 17.5 hours writing and formatting a guide for how to use Diigo (a social bookmarking website) to build a genealogy resource toolbox. In total, I wrote 5,297 words over those two days, but since it wasn’t about my family history, I don’t think it should count (but hey, I did write something genealogy-related, so that’s a good thing, right?).
Today, I wrote my blog post for the Genealogy By the States theme, and I made sure it had something to do with my family history. So I wrote about my 11th great-grandfather, John Webster, and my 10th great-granduncle, Robert Treat, who both served as governor for the Colony of Connecticut. I managed to crank out 801 words in five hours (part of that time included some additional research). Again, I was over my 200 words/day goal by 4%.
I know the goal is to write a certain amount of words EACH day, and my goal was 200. And although I only spent two out of seven days writing about my family history, I actually did surpass my overall goal. For seven days at 200 words/day, I should have accumulated 1,400 words total. I wrote a total of 1,739 for the week, so I feel like I am achieving my goal, just a little differently. And, hey, add in the nearly 5,300 words that were genealogy-related, heck, I made the goal for the month (and then some) in just four days of writing!
But unfortunately, that is not the point of the challenge. The point is to write a little bit each day. And now that I’ve gotten that big writing project out of my system, hopefully the stomach bug will follow and I can manage to get a little bit done each day for the rest of the month.
You may not have met your goal but I think you did fantastic under the circumstance.
Betty
Thanks, Betty!
I think you did great, considering being sick and writing over 1,000 words about something else. I forgot to check my word count today. Better go do it.