It’s that time again. I’m participating in this year’s Clarion West Write-a-thon. The Write-a-thon runs for six weeks: June 23rd through August 3rd. My goal this year is the same modest goal I had last year: complete and polish a story. Maybe two, if I press my nose to the grindstone. In the spirit of Clarion West, I’m working on something science fictional. My secondary goal is to form some better writing habits. I’m going to try to work for an hour a day, five days a week. By the end of the six weeks, hopefully I’ll have made working on my own projects a solid part of my workweek.
I’ll be posting here about my progress and process.
You can sponsor me, if you like. Proceeds benefit the Clarion Foundation.
A. Werner 
That sounds like a solid, reasonable goal. Are you shooting for any particular word count?
I usually don’t shoot for a particular word count with writing challenges, as I like lean fiction. It works better for me to make goals related to completion/revision, or to try to spend a certain amount of hours writing each week. Otherwise I’ll just end up writing to fill space, which makes my revisions more difficult later on.
Are you participating in this year’s Write-a-thon?
Not officially. my friends and family aren’t exactly huge readers of my work so I think I’d have trouble finding sponsorship. I do like the structure of setting firm goals regarding my work, so I have to think about where I want to be by August 3rd.
And funny enough, I generally have a word count in mind when I’m writing short fiction since it helps me determine which markets it might fit into. I figure that if I’m going over 5,000 in a short story, my market has probably shrunk significantly. I usually shoot for about 2,500 words.
Good point, word counts can be very helpful when thinking about particular markets. My work tends to run on the shorter side, so I usually don’t have to worry about that too much unless I end up in an awkward flash/short in-between zone.