Get Your What Now?

We are a group of writers aiming for large word counts in the year 2012. It's often too easy to let writing fall to the side, and to later regret the words we never wrote. We offer five challenging pledge levels for those who are serious about increasing their numbers over the year.

Membership is currently open for 2012. If you are interested in joining, please visit the getyourwordsout community on LJ to sign up.

Membership Requirements

Given that this is a year-long challenge, we expect members to be writing throughout the year. While obviously some months will be better than others, and life can toss roadblocks into writing plans, we are here to encourage finding every spare moment to write something despite these distractions.

As such, we have 2 participation requirements:

• All members must participate in the monthly check-ins. Each month members provide their current year-to-date (YTD) totals to the moderators. You will only ever be required to provide numbers; sharing what is written is completely optional.
• At the March check-in, members must have written some number of words for their goal.

The YTD totals will be used by the moderators to determine trends in the group and help gauge when additional encouragement may be needed. We will also keep a running total of all members' word counts in a spreadsheet available only for members' viewing. This will be useful when technology rebels or when scraps of paper walk away and a recorded count is lost.

If you know that you will be unavailable during the time frame for an upcoming check-in, you can request to be excused through the website. If you do not check in for a month, that will be noted; three months in a row without checking in will result in your removal from the community.

We strongly suggest that you enable PMs on the account you use to join the community. Any reminders from the moderators to members is conducted using LJ's Private Message system. We promise not to abuse your LJ Inbox, and if you keep up with member participation you may never have to hear from us that way. If your PMs are not enabled, you are agreeing that you will be responsible to keep up your participation requirement and check-in each month without a reminder.

For more information about check-ins, membership changes, and frequently asked questions, please see the member guides in our site navigation.

The Pledges

Members who pledge for 2012 are permitted to use any number of writing projects to add to their word count over the year. Projects may include (among other things) fanfics, poems, songs, essays, and short stories. For more information on what kinds of projects we count please see Countable Words.

There are five goals for 2012:

• Modest — 150K; roughly 12.5K words/month
• Basic — 200K; roughly 16.7K words/month
• Moderate — 250K; roughly 20.8K words/month
• Difficult — 300K; roughly 25.0K words/month
• Insane — 350K; roughly 29.1K words/month