Ultimate Writing Challenge

Welcome to the Maximum Geek Ultimate Writing Challenge. Right now you’re probably asking yourself “What is the Maximum Geek Ultimate Writing Challenge?” and that is an excellent question. In short, it’s a challenge to write all year long. Many people participate in NaNoWriMo and for the record I think NaNoWriMo is awesome. The thing is a lot of people don’t follow through after NaNo. Many of them stop writing and a lot of them never edit what they’ve written. In fact a lot of people see their NaNo efforts as beyond hope once they’re done.

Don’t get me wrong, NaNo does awesome things for writers and I think it’s an incredibly useful exercise, whether you finish it or not. It  can teach you a lot about writing and it can teach you a lot about yourself as a writer (I, for instance, need to plot far better than I did for this years NaNo). There are two problems though, there’s no follow through, there’s no credit for editing and there’s only one goal, which can be very hard to reach if you have a busy life. The Maximum Geek Ultimate Writing Challenge is something bigger than that.

MGUWC is a tiered challenge, not everyone can realistically write ~2,000 words a day. Some of us have jobs, family and school. We still want to be writers, but we don’t want to feel like we’re failing because we’re not hitting that high mark. So there are three word count goals in the MGUWC 2,000 words, 1,000 words and 500 words (if there are enough people doing short form poetry and journaling I could be convinced to add a 100 or 200 word category as well). Those don’t just reflect different amounts of time to work though, they also help reflect type of writing. A poem or a journal entry may be very short.

Word count isn’t the only way to get your writing in for the day when it comes to MGUWC. Since writing is only part of the process of creating many of these works we also want to account for the editing process. So if your first draft is done you move onto editing, which we’ll be measuring in time spent. The three tiers of editing will be 2 hours, 1 hour and 30 minutes.

So now those who don’t have the time to write 2,000 words can compete with those who can by putting themselves in lower tier. So look for some tools later this month (or early next month depending on how development goes).