On Pacemaker, the Best Word Count Planner in the World

Plus, the five best books I read this year.

Hello friends,

Happy holidays, obviously!

I’ve been clawing my way through the novel draft I mentioned in October. As usual, I did not hit 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. I wrote 24,052 words in November, in fact. But I’m still trucking!

I know exactly how many words I wrote in November because I use a website called Pacemaker to track them. I mentioned Pacemaker briefly in the October newsletter, but this month I want to dedicate more time to it, because it’s a major part of my drafting process and a huge motivator for me, and I bet it can help you, too.

This newsletter also includes a bit of year-end review, plus the best books I read this year. Onward!

News

• My short story “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” will be published in Diabolical Plots in 2024.

• My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in... 2024, I guess?

• My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette, Gender, and Race in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in late 2024 or early 2025.

Subscribe to get notified when these come out!

Pacemaker

Pacemaker Planner is what it says on the tin: “a word count planner for writers and students.” (Please note that the URL is pacemaker.press, not pacemaker dot com.) 

Apparently Holly Black uses it?

The way it works is, you plug in the project you’re working on, the number of words you want to hit, and the deadline you want to hit it by. Let’s say I’m rough-drafting a novel, and I want to hit 70,000 words by December 31. (…) I can plug that information into Pacemaker, and it’ll tell me how many words I have to write per day in order to reach my goal.

Of course, I could do that with a spreadsheet, though. What sets Pacemaker apart is its adaptability and flexibility. 

In Pacemaker, you can enter different parameters for specific dates or date blocks. So, let’s say I want to skip weekends, a week of vacation, and Thanksgiving, and let’s say I want to write more between Christmas and New Year’s. Pacemaker will account for all that.

Want to start off writing a ton of words and then write fewer as you approach your deadline? Tell Pacemaker you want to “bite the bullet.”

And if you miss a day or two – or, better yet, manage to write extra words at some point! – Pacemaker will automatically re-adjust your entire plan to keep you on track.

There’s a free version and two paid versions. I use the premium paid version. I like the ability to archive my finished projects, so I can go back and look at them later and feel good about myself. I also like the ability to make notes on my daily progress; over time, I can see whether, for example, I work better at night or in the morning. And I like to make my plans private, even if later on I apparently decide to post screenshots of them to my public newsletter.

But the free version is absolutely sufficient, especially if you just want to give it a shot and see if the app’s basic functionality is a motivator for you.

For me, it definitely is. I love a fake deadline. I love breaking a giant task up into manageable little chunks. I love the flexibility that means that if I miss a couple of days, and I will, the plan will re-adjust and it’s not a problem and I don’t have to kick myself up and down the road.

Finally, Pacemaker also lets you set goals for non-writing activities, like tracking hours spent on something, or miles run, or dollars saved. But it’s pretty clearly designed for writing and editing.

The Five Best Books I Read This Year

It was really hard for me to pick five, you guys. So before I tell you what they are, I want to list out the honorable mentions:

• Naomi Alderman, Disobedience

• John Williams, Stoner

• Mona Awad, Rouge

• Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (an old favorite of mine) and The Man in the High Castle

• Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

• Emma Donoghue’s Room and The Wonder

(To be clear, this list isn’t the best books that came out in 2023. It’s just the best books I read in 2023. Let’s give some love to the backlist!)

The final cuts:

David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

I never listen to audiobooks, but I checked this one out of the library for a long drive. I’ve never read much Sedaris, and to my surprise, I found these essays absolutely fascinating. They’re characterized by a very discomfiting mixture of punching-down-at-others and punching-down-at-self without any apparent differentiation between the two. And their structure is really interesting; they’re simultaneously very carefully put together and almost stream-of-consciousness, in a way that I found, again, discomfiting. Yet appealing!

Don’t get me wrong, they’re also laugh-out-loud funny, but despite the fact that Sedaris is a humorist, I did not find humor their primary quality! Rather, I thought their primary quality was the care with which they were clearly written.

I read somewhere that Sedaris rewrites all of his essays 15 or 20 times before publishing them, which tracks.

Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp

A charming little picture book about an anxious man writing and publishing a novel. Classic Edward Gorey. Laugh-out-loud delightful. Notable for its extravagant use of “the Earbrass type” of illustration. An excellent gift for the writer in your life, in case you’re still panicking about what to get someone. 

Naben Ruthnum, Helpmeet

An absolutely freakish, extraordinarily unsettling slice of body horror, wherein a woman takes care of her decaying husband. This book is very short; you could read it in a day. (In this way, it is longer than The Unstrung Harp, which you can read in about ten minutes.) 

Many reviewers of this book seem not to understand why the protagonist would take care of her husband in the way that she does, or why she continues to be married to him given some of his behaviors. I think all of those people are missing the point.

Sandra Newman, Julia

A retelling of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from Julia’s point of view.

I was shocked at how much I liked this book. I’m a George Orwell stan; he's probably my favorite author, maybe second-favorite after Susanna Clarke. I think his prose is unmatched for cleanness and clarity. I love his calm yet relentless pursuit of truth and justice through the written word. I've read all his essays and all his books, including the ones that no one reads (*cough* Keep the Aspidistra Flying *cough*). I return probably annually to his essay on Salvador Dalí. I've read Nineteen Eighty-Four at least a dozen times. I might go so far as to say that I think Nineteen Eighty-Four is the only really effective depiction of a dystopia out there.

So you should believe me when I say that Sandra Newman's Julia is really, really good.

She does a spectacular job of weaving a different story around Winston's, and of showing the same Airstrip One from the perspective of someone else – a woman, a younger person, a more adventurous person, with a different history relating to the Party and a different set of memories. It feels like the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is expanded here rather than changed, and in a convincing way that makes room for Winston and Julia both. The story does make some bold plot choices that I think will be polarizing – particularly the last quarter or so, which is the only part of the book that I think meaningfully goes against the core of what Nineteen Eighty-Four is about – but I think they're really active, impressive choices, not cheap at all. I love especially that Julia's story doesn't end where Winston's does. She gets to be entirely her own person here.

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

I know, I know, I know. God, this book has been hyped so much since it came out in 2018. I finally picked it up this past summer, expecting to be bored and disappointed by it, the way I always am when I read a book that’s gotten a lot of hype.

Instead, I came away saying, “How did this book get so much hype???”

Not because it’s bad, but because it’s the opposite. Because it’s bizarre and unexpected and disturbing and unorthodox in a way you never see from books that get a ton of conventional press.

The voice is absolutely what makes this book so compelling: it’s straightforward, stark, full of character, and peppered by faintly shocking little descriptions (like a character’s head “floating three inches to the left”). It’s also absolutely soaked in self-disgust, in a way you never see. And the second half of the book is a master-class in creeping dread.

Year in Review

I suppose I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my 2023 publications in my own dang newsletter:

• My essay “Form as Laboratory,” about using poetry to experiment with different ideas and methods of writing, was published in Blood and Spades: Poets of the Dark Side in March 2023. (Bonus content: My goofy little poems “The Queen Converses with Her Jailer,” “Further Experiments in the Revival of Organisms,” and “Observations of a Shoggoth”!) 

• My essay ‘You Have to Cook It In Your Own House’: One Family’s Pork and Sauerkraut Ritual” was published in Heritage Local in summer 2023. It’s about the southeastern Pennsylvanian tradition of cooking pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s, and how I always thought this was an Irish tradition, because I lacked critical thinking skills as a child, I guess.

• My poem “Ophelia After Her Distress” was published in Shakespeare Unleashed in July 2023, alongside works by Jonathan Maberry (!) and Seanan McGuire (!!!).

I also taught classes at Blue Stoop and the MetroWest Writers’ Guild, and I’ll be teaching at both places again in 2024. Stay tuned – as soon as registration links are posted, you’ll be the first to know.

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Happy New Year, everyone! May you have a fruitful and nourishing year of creativity, and at least one day off work before 2024.