Lessons from the Spreadsheet Queen

Fondly known as “The Spreadsheet Queen,” Jeffe Kennedy has long discussed in various venues her extensive Excel spreadsheets for tracking writing progress. She tracks word count by day, week, month, and year, along with writing goals and Gantt charts for planning workload and release schedules. While she freely shares a blank template of her “Progress Count” workbooks, multiple people have requested a tutorial in using them. In this workshop, Jeffe will walk people through her worksheets, where to find the embedded formulae and conditional formatting to highlight goals reached. She’ll explain how to adapt the spreadsheets for personal use and give suggestions for building in additional features. Every attendee will receive a blank template workbook to adapt, along with an annotated reference guide to Jeffe’s version, complete with examples. The discussion will also include how to set personal writing goals, what to take into consideration and how to train the writing muscle for greater endurance, much like training the body for a marathon. In addition, the general Three-Act story structure will be introduced, as the spreadsheets calculate progress toward climaxes, which allows even far-end pantsers like Jeffe to predict beats and overall novel length.