Years ago, before the fall of Twitter, I followed Christie Yant (largely quiet these days, or at least I am unsure where she has web presence). She used to make the most delightful spreadsheet called Tools for Writers, which I have linked the most recent version of. It was a template for folks trying to track their publishing progress. I need to make an updated version of the writing progress tracker, but my Google Sheets skills are less than great so it takes me forever to do stuff like that, thus why I no longer really have accurate annual writing stats.1 Laziness strikes again.
Anyway, one of the Tools she provided in this suite is not so technical. It’s author bingo. You make it yourself, and you can always add other things into it. Essentially, it’s a gamified bucket list. I mostly don’t look at author bingo, but recently I was inspired by Andrew K. Clark’s post about his book cake. I have a deep desire for someone to bake me a book cake now. It shall go in my author bingo. In fact, I think I will make a new author bingo that is only frivolous, happy little goals — not awards, no sales. Just book cake, spontaneous character art, fan mail, trope writing — things that have little directly to do with the business of writing.2
What are you going to put on your author bingo?
- Pacemaker can also be sort of hacked to do this, and I would love to hear of other tracking options below. Obviously WordPress tracks my wordcount here annually, but it gets a lot harder when I’m working on revisions/multiple projects in a year, which is usually what is happening. ↩︎
- Too much of writing is business, let us all remember the frivolity. ↩︎
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