I have a dilemma.

I would like some kind of widget to display my writing progress, but it must meet certain criteria.

It must not depend on word count. I don’t want to set a numerical goal, and just show off how close I am to that goal.
I don’t have numerical goals.
Aside from NaNoWriMo, I have no idea how many words a given story should be, nor do I care at this stage; I just set out to write a particular story, and worry about length when I see who I can submit it to.

I want a quality goal: Is the story plotted out, is it written, have I finished editing? Have I sent it in for publication? Has it been published?
Most of the widgets I’ve seen are word count meters, nothing more. If I can display word or page count, great! But I need more than that. I need to show which stage the story is in.

It must support multiple stories.
I have two stories I’ve actually completed, one of which is “published” (fanfiction on deviantArt), and the other has just entered the “final edits” stage.
I have many other stories in varying stages of completion.

It needs to be compatible with a free, WordPress.com hosted site.
So no WordPress.org plug-ins.
Nothing that requires CSS, or any of the other features I have to pay for.
I want something I can use now, not a year from now when I finally have an income and my own paid-for domain.

It needs to auto-update wherever I display it.
I should make a change to one location–the source of the widget–to update my progress in whichever story, and find that change reflected everywhere I’ve posted the widget.
Yes, I can add a text/html widget to WordPress and simply update that. Yes, any changes are reflected on every page of that site.
But not on my other WP sites. Not on other sites that may not even use WordPress.
See, I’m playing around with journal skins on deviantArt. If I have two journals with the same skin, and I make a change to that skin, both journals do not change. Only the one I had open when I edited the skin changes.
I want a widget that I can simply link in the journals. An off-site graphic, perhaps.

It needs to be clean.
A small bar graph, perhaps, with each story as a separate bar? And each milestone/stage could be a different color.
Then the word count could dictate the length of the bar, nothing more.
Or perhaps, instead, the length of the bar is dictated by the date. Perhaps the color changes when I moved from one stage to another, rather than after how many words.
(That’s starting to sound vaguely like a Gantt chart….)
And if I go back and forth–as in my 2010 NaNo, which skipped the plotting stage entirely, went straight into writing in November, and frequently cycled through the first three stages ever since?
I don’t know. I’m just pulling things out of thin air, now.

Any ideas? Before I try creating my own?

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