March is over. That's another month in my writing quest to beat my highest annual word total ever. I've actually done five full months now...plus the last four days of October since I started the day after my birthday.
I had a bunch of goals for March. How did they go? Did I succeed? Well, let's start with the writing goal. In March, I gave myself a floor of 1,333 words per day in a quest to get my highest word count for a month ever. I had set that record back in January when I got 41,309 words in that month. If I managed to write 1,333 words a day, then I should have eclipsed that mark by something like fifteen words. Did I make it? Well, here's my chart for March:
Boom, baby! That's right. I hit at least 1,333 ever day, and since you don't just stop typing in the middle of a sentence, I always went over that total, sometimes by a hundred words or more. So, my new record is 43,745. That's my high water mark for writing, and it feels pretty good to be there.
So, beating the record by more than a thousand words put me at what percentage? Let's check the meter.
105% of the goal...in fact, it was a only a smidge short of 106%. That feels good. I'm not going to post the video a second time, but I should. It was a lot of work to get to that record, too. 1,333 is a good deal more than 1,000. It was surprising to me sometimes. I often could tell when I'd made it to 1,000. I've been using that as my goal for so long that I almost feel the length instinctively. 1,333 is a whole third of the way to another thousand, though. There were so many times that I would check my word count to discover that I still had about 300 words to go. That was the most common number I saw each time I checked. It takes some getting used to. I can definitely do it, but it takes more effort.
So, I managed to hit a new all-time record for a month. That was a success, but that's not all of what we're about here. This is a year long process that we're working on here. How is the year going? Well, here's the year-to-date.
I put all five months and four days on in one picture, but I realize that it makes the type on there pretty small and difficult to read. Since I'm totally certain that you're following this process with bated breath and want to be able to see every single word count clearly, here's the larger version of the chart.
So, with the total written in type large enough to read, you can see that I am now at 188,574 words for the year. That's getting up there. What percent of the way am I to my goal? Well, I added a line that tells me just below the goal, but I still like to show my word count meter every time. So, here it is:
So, at five months and four days, I am 61.93% of the way to my goal. I'm really pleased with that. If I can keep this up, then I'll destroy that goal. Since we're doing Van Halen today, I guess I have to finish what I started.
I just gotta keep it up. That's the real key. If I do, I'll probably make it to 400,000 words on the year. That'd be pretty awesome.
So, the writing's going pretty good. As I posted yesterday, I finished my novel that I have been calling "Love Walks In."
Yesterday afternoon, I tried to come up with a better title for it. I wrote down a bunch of words that I liked and made about ten options, then I texted them to Rish to see what his opinion was.
I wanted a title that didn't give away too much, but still said a little something about the story. "Love Walks In" sounded like the title of a romance novel, and readers of romances would probably be unimpressed with what I delivered...even though it does have some romance elements in there.
Rish really like the word "irresistible," but didn't like the words I'd paired it with. He gave me different suggestions.
My personal favorite of the bunch had been Irresistible Threat, so we were on, if not the same page, two pages that were pretty close together...like page 163 and page 165, you know? I suggested Irresistible Invader, and all of a sudden he wasn't texting me anymore, but calling. He said he liked that title, because Invader was most associated with Space Invaders, so it had an alien connotation without using the word alien...and of course having the alliteration was nice too. Everybody loves alliteration.
So, it looks like I'm going with Irresistible Invader. That, plus a cover with a girl with glowing green eyes that looks something like this one I made a while ago when I was trying out the title "Contact Is All It Takes" should do the trick...I hope.
Here it is, reworked with the new title...
Now, I've started into another story. This one has a title already. It's called "Digital Wizards," and is about the obsession that I developed with creating AI art for covers over the past few months. I've taken that experience and turned it into a horror story that hopefully will leave you squirming when you read it. I'm already about 2,000 words in. It'll probably be another novelette or novella, but I really don't think this idea has legs enough to reach novel length like Irresistible Invader did.
At this point in the process, I've written two novels, a novella, and a novelette since my birthday. That doesn't sound like that much, but only because I'm used to writing short stories all these years. If I wrote 188,000 words and they were all short stories, I'd probably have about twenty of them, but novels and novellas are much longer and so there's not such a high number involved. Considering I've only written six novels in my whole life, the fact that two of them happened in less than five months is pretty good.
Okay, so where are we with my other goals for the month? Well, what were those goals? My second goal was to publish at least eight stories on Amazon. If you've read any of my updates during the month, however, you know that I crushed that goal a long time ago. In fact, my final total for stories published is twenty! What does that give me on the old progress meter?
250% of my goal. That's pretty impressive, right? I could have done way more, except I ran out of stories to publish. There's one more that I made a cover for, but I'm reticent to publish. It's dark as fuck, and I'm worried about putting it out there. I figured I'd send it to Rish and he could read it and tell me what he thought. He suspects that he'll just tell me to publish it and not worry about what people think, but for some reason, I'm too nervous to do that. So, I need some kind of reassurance from him. After that, the only stories I have are from an era that I don't think I'll delve into. They're from the days when I was barely starting to learn how to do this writing thing. Most of them were pretty bad. If I ever publish them, I'll probably completely rewrite them first and publish the new version.
Since I love showing off the covers that I made over the last while, here are the ones that I've published this month:
Yup, they even let me publish "Last Contact," so I"m pretty much done with publishing short stories. Next up is probably getting one of the novels out...or maybe getting "The Elephant in the Room," which is nearly as long as a novel, only 5,000 words shy. So, that's the deal with that goal. Crushed that one too.
The last major goal of the month was to finish up the audio for Christmas Creatures, my Christmas short story collection that I put out in 2022. At least, that's when I published the eBook of it. The print books, both hardcover and paperback, came out last year. I was supposed to have finished the audiobook by November of last year, but I didn't. So, this month, I decided I would make publishing that audio my priority.
Of course, it wasn't really my priority. Publishing all the short stories was what I really made my priority, because I knew what I was doing with that. The audiobook stuff over on ACX was kind of a mystery to me. I was going to have to do some investigating into that, and I put it off for as long as I could. Once I published every short story I possibly could, though, I had no more excuses.
So, I looked into the requirement, filled out the paperwork, and finally assembled the files for the audiobook to start uploading them. With a few days to spare, I uploaded all eight hours of the Christmas Creatures audiobook. It says it will take ten days to check everything and make sure that it clears the bar for publishing, but I have submitted my audiobook for publishing, which means I hit that goal too.
This is a Titanically long post, but it's getting close to an end here. Now that we've determined that March was an awesome month where I achieved all the goals I set, including hitting records for word count, publishing nearly every story I've ever written, and getting my first audiobook uploaded, it's time to look at the month to come.
April is a little shorter than March. It's only thirty days, so I don't think I'm going to make a run at getting another record high total for the month. It could happen, but I'm not going there this time. 1,333 words a day was pretty taxing, and I don't think I quite have a handle on that total yet. Maybe next month it will feel like it's easier, and I can raise it another level to 1,400 or 1,500. For now, I'll stick to my guns and go with 1,333 a day. That means my total goal for the month is 39,990. That's still a really great total, and only three thousand shy of the record, so if I have a bunch of good days, I may well eclipse it anyway.
What I'd like to work on instead of raising word count is story craft. I feel like I need to put a little more of the important story elements into my work. I've seen these YouTube videos that really impressed me by a guy named Tyler Mowery. Videos like this one:
His stuff is more about screenwriting than novel writing, but the important parts like creating great character or creating story conflict are important for both types of writing. I want to watch his videos this month, take notes, and really try to make the principles he talks about integral to my storytelling. "Digital Wizards" will only last so long, and then I'll have to start something new. I'd like to use the time leading up to that to prepare a really great outline and plan for one of my projects I've been talking about for a while. I'm thinking I'll really see if I can't get my book idea for "The Skeleton Crew" worked out before I finish up on "Digital Wizards" so I can write that book next. It's got a decent amount of background already. I just need to do some more before I start writing.
As my last goal for the month, I'm going to put my second audiobook out. I am about 80% of the way finished with the audio for my other short story collection, Kingdom of Flies and Fireflies. I just need to record the narration for Kingdom of Flies and the narration for Moonlit Confession and I'm done. Well, not done. I'll have to edit them after that, and then assemble all the files, but you know what I mean. "Moonlit Confession" is less than 2,500 words. I could have that done in a day. Kingdom of Flies is a little more substantial, but wouldn't take too much work either. So, I'm vowing to have that audiobook submitted before the month of April ends.
That should do it for me. Maybe I'll get to other things if I finish any of those goals early. I would like to get my third collection which I'm calling A Battalion of Ideas done too. That'll be the next order of business after the audiobook of Kingdom of Flies and Fireflies finishes up, but that's not for April. Maybe I'll do some of it in April, but it's not an official goal.
So, on into April we go. This ain't no joke, folks! We're going for it!
No comments:
Post a Comment