Who’s up for a little challenge? A little race…? Who wants to see nail biting action, buckets of sweat and high-speed chases?

Good.

Stick around. I’m not offering you screenings of The Fast and the Furious or anything like that, no. I’m offering you a chance to see Ileandra and myself race against each other through the course of the year.

Okay. Maybe that first paragraph has led to a slight anti-climax, but you can always go rent the damn film if you want.

Credit: J_Alves on OpenClipArt.com

Ileandra and I are going to race each other to reach 300,000 written over the course of the year. In 2012 Ileandra did this all by herself, trying to reach 300,000 words. She made an excellent effort considering that was the year the sprogs were born and reached a very respectable 72% of target. This year, however, it’s a race against me.

Ha!

Overall, between us, we’d like to write 300,000 words this year. Just to see if we can. That total is split evenly between us to make 150,000 words each and those are our individual targets for the year.

Like last time there will be word counters and funky widgets to keep things interesting and some sort of weird penalty thing for the looooooser. Heh, we’ll figure that out nearer the end, though I imagine it will involve doing something we dislike and ensuring that there is picture evidence.

You’ll see the pages for this challenge appear over the next day or so and that will be the place to go to check in on how we’re getting on. Rules for the challenge are pretty easy. The ambitious total of 150,000 words can only include:

• Blog posts (including reviews)
• First drafts (short stories, novellas, flash fiction, novels, etc)
• Letters
• Articles
• Commissions

Basically… anything creative or money earning. Beyond that, it doesn’t get included.

Credit: skotan on OpenClipArt.com

I’m already looking forward to this. I guess a lot of that total will hinge on who gets to do NaNoWriMo this year, but we’ll argue about that come August, which is when planning usually starts to happen.

Wish us luck, eh?