I’ve been looking for a public wordcount meter to help keep me accountable to my novel writing goals. I recently came across The Zokutou Word Meter, which is part of nicely-designed UK-based Zokutou Writers’ Group site with its own writers’ forum.
Dear lord, can I ever identify with this comic strip some days…it’s SO easy to get distracted by stuff online, especially when you can almost justify your surfing because it kind of sort of relates to work. Then I started investigating other wordcount meters and I also found the Writertopia meter: provides two graphical progress meters that can be embedded in your web page or blog. Does anyone know of any others?
Also, I’ve been Googling in hopes of finding a good Excel wordcount progress layout. I’ve found several related to NaNoWriMo and could modify those, but I’m hoping to find one where I don’t have to change the dates, etc. Features I’m looking for:
- I can enter the total number of words in the document each day.
- It shows me the number of words I’ve written that day.
Bonus features would include fancypants charts and stats. Yes, I know I could probably put together an Excel spreadsheet myself that accomplishes the basics, but I’m hoping for some bells and whistles as well.
If anyone out there knows of a spreadsheet layout like this available online, I’d appreciate you letting me know, thanks! I’ll include results in one of my “software for writers” follow-up posts.
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Do you use a writing program that has a progress meter in it? I am a Mac user and I use Scrivener, which is a super fantastic writing program without too many whistles, just the ones you really need, including a word counter. If you have a mac, take a look. Otherwise, there’s a good Windows one called WriteItNow, which I used to use, also really good.
I love Scrivener, but I’m not doing my actual writing in it, just the outlining. I’ve heard that the program slows down when the wordcount gets high, and that concerns me a bit.
How many words are in your Scrivener doc?
There’s a Unix utility called “wc” that gives you line, word, and character counts of any plain-text document. If you’re using a Mac you have it somewhere; on a PC you have to install Cygwin.
Computing a daily word count and mailing it to you can be done in about two lines of shell script.
Oh, the heck with it:
expr `wc -w novel.txt` - `cat yesterday` | mail you@localhost’; wc -w novel.txt > yesterday
I love Unix!
You might ask Thesilée. She recently designed an excel-sheet for writing progress for the Tintenzirkel (bunch of German hobby fantasy authors, see http://www.tinzenzirkel.de ), so that we could do something like NaNoWriMo every month. You can set your own word-goal and enter your daily progress and it will tell you whether you wrote enough to be in the daily pensum and how much you’ll have to write the remaining days to reach your goal.
If you’re interested, best ask Thesilée.
thanks for the writing progress meter links they’re v. handy, i’ve stuck the zokoutou one on my website.
If you’re interested I’ve made myself my own excel spreadsheet to chart my progress. it’s got daily and weekly word goals plus a chart to show you what’s going on. If you want a copy to see if it will suit your purposes just send me an email. I’d send you a link to it but it’s not on any website x
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