First Half Of May In The Books

Okay, it's the 16th, so I'm here to report on the first half of May. It's been a bit of a tough month, to tell you the truth. I haven't had any slip ups or missed any days, but each day has been a little tough to get my goal of 1,333 words per day. 

I have a bit of a malaise. I don't feel like writing right now. I do it anyway, which is probably pretty great. I guess I'm keeping with Heinlien's five rules, particularly rule number 2: You must finish what you write. I haven't quit on anything, but I'm not as excited to keep going as I have been with other things. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I was writing into the dark. I hadn't planned out my novel at all. I was just trying to feel my way through it, and that is a little daunting. Because of that, I'm going to have to go back and fix some stuff too, stuff that doesn't jibe with what I came up with later. I hate that kind of thing.

Anyway, here's how my month has gone so far:

It actually looks pretty good, doesn't it? Those are really good word count totals, and the cumulative monthly total is really great. 21,151 is good enough to flirt with turning this month into my all-time record word count month. I could easily make that. You can particularly tell when you look at my average word count:

For most of the month, my average has been the highest it's ever been. Only within the last few days has it dipped down to where it is merely challenging March for the best ever instead of being obviously the best ever. A few days of above average totals, and I'd be back up there again. Weird to think that such a thing is possible at a time when I don't even particularly want to write that badly, and I'm mostly doing it because of obligation to keep my goals.

Here's the rest of the year:

Yeah, that's hard to see six months worth of word counts, but you can click on it, and it will enlarge it for you if you really want to know how it's gone. Add that chart together to the one for May, and here is my year-to-date totals:

That's right, this half of the month put me over the 250,000 mark. That's pretty awesome. I'm getting so close. If I get another 20,000 words for the second half of this month, that would leave me with only 30,000 to get to 300,000. I haven't had a total that low since I started doing 1,000 words a day back in December, which basically means that June is the month when I will eclipse my yearlong goal. Six weeks from now, I'll have nailed it. That's pretty sweet. I remember in 2019-2020, the last time I achieved a goal like this, it took me all the way to the end of August to make it to the end. So, I'm doing a lot better this time.

Of course, how much I write isn't my only goal for the month. In fact, I listed them out in the last post. Goals for May:

1. 1,333 words per day, 41,323 in total for the month
2. Finish 64% of Battalion of Ideas audiobook
3. Publish eBook, paperback, and hardcover of "Three Vampire Weekend"

The first goal is coming well. How is the second one? Well, I'm doing okay. I've gotten four of the eight stories that I had to record and edit done, although they were the four shortest stories. The next four are much longer, and I fear that I won't make it on that. I'm going to try my best, but I'm a little dispirited about the whole thing. Not only do I have all of that audio to record and edit, but I still haven't started on this month's Anklecast, which has priority. I'm going to make it a little easier this time, but it will take time away from working on the Audiobook, so it will be even harder to achieve. I'm coming along, and making some progress though.

The third goal, publish the eBook, paperback, and hardcover of "Three Vampire Weekend" is coming along as well. I published the eBook yesterday, and it is now available if you'd like it. 

That took a lot of work, because it contains the novella, "The Elephant in the Room" which I wrote just a few months ago. It still needed all of the editing done to it, but I struggled my way through it, and hopefully, y'all will enjoy it. I'm getting the physical copies together. That will take several days as well. The cover design may take me a bit too. We'll have to see if I can manage to get them all published in time, but at the very least, I've got it partially published, and we're only at the halfway mark of the month.

I'll do a whole post about the publishing of the collection tomorrow, so you can hear a little more about it then. I suppose I ought to publish "The Elephant in the Room" in a standalone version as well. I guess there's another goal for the month to throw on top of the pile.

I may have overextended myself with the goals this time around. I tried to be ambitious without going too extreme, but I feel a little overwhelmed. The worst part about that is that it makes me want to avoid doing the stuff that would lead to achieving the goals. Very anti-productive. I'm pushing through, however, and maybe I'll even manage to achieve it all. Who knows? We'll keep trying, and I'll let you know how it went on the 1st of June.