June In The Books

It almost feels as though this monthly roundup isn't necessary after posting my writing total every day for most of the month leading up to my eventual eclipsing of my goal for the year as well as posting my audiobook progress every day until I made it to the end of that goal as well. I guess I still should, though. The month kept going after that. Let’s see, here’s the yearly total so far:

So, that’s where my totals stand now, and, as I said at the start and in my blog post from earlier this month, I surpassed my goal of 304,475 words for the year. That makes this officially my best year ever as a writer…at least word count-wise.

I kept going after I hit my goal, of course, and here is what my total sits at with June’s final tally included:

So, I’m another 10,000 words beyond my goal. Something pretty crazy is that I went through and added up just the words that I wrote this year, excluding the words from October, November, and December of last year, and I hit almost exactly 250,000 words. If I wrote 205,000 words in the first half of 2024, I could conceivably get 500,000 for the year. 

I’m tempted to start working toward that goal right now…except that I don’t want to. I am a little bit burned out, to tell you the truth. For the last while it has been difficult to even hit my goal from day to day.  If you look at June a little closer, you’ll see that I missed the mark on three separate occasions.

The second time it happened was mostly because things were out of my control. It was a hugely busy day, and I just didn’t have time to finish what I was doing. In fact, I ended the day’s writing in the middle of a sentence, because I was interrupted and never was able to go back and finish up. However, the other two days that I fell short were because I just plain wasn’t feeling it. Not that I wasn’t feeling very into the story I was working on, but that I was just not feeling like writing.

I may have overdone it a little or something. I may need to start scheduling some time off or something. People take vacations from work. They give themselves a break so that they can return and get back into things with renewed vigor, maybe I need to do that as well. I do this every single day. I don’t even give myself a weekend. Is that necessary? I don’t know if it is.

I have to admit that I am very worried that if I give myself a break, I’m afraid that I’ll go back to my old habits of doing absolutely nothing. I’ve done it before, so I could see myself doing it again. But I might do it anyway if I don’t give myself a break. One day I may just spit out a bunch of curse words and quit, turning my back on the whole effort.

I guess that’s something that I’m going to mess around with this month. I’m not going to give myself any kind of a goal, because I may well take a bit of a vacation from writing for a time. I haven't decided for sure what that will be, but it’s okay…after all, I already passed my goal. I’ve got nothing to prove anymore.

Beyond that, I want to change the way I work up a little bit too. These past few months have been really difficult, because I felt like I wasn’t prepared for what I was writing. I hadn’t gone through and outlined my book out. I just wrote it with a very scant idea of what I wanted. Unfortunately, I think it showed. I don’t think I produced something that was very worthwhile. I want to change that, which means I’ll have to change up my process, and work on putting time into outlining as well as writing.

How to do that? I don’t know. Are you a writer? What is your process? Comment below, please.

I was thinking of either taking a week or two or three off of writing on anything while I spend my normal writing time planning out and outlining the books…or I could lower my word count and spend half of my time outlining the next project while writing on the current one. Something like that, anyway. I’m going to try something out this month.

Presently, I’m writing a story about a haunted car thanks to a push from Rish Outfield. He may write his own version of the same tale. It could be another one of our Broken Mirror stories. Someday, we ought to publish a collection that includes a bunch of those stories together or something. Would such a thing interest you? Comment below, please.

Anyway, moving on to my other goal for the month. I’d fallen a little short on my efforts to finish half of the remainder of the audiobook for A Battalion of Ideas] in May. So, I scaled back my goals and made finishing the audiobook my only other goal. I pushed forward with the recording, slamming it all out really quickly, then jumped on the editing. I had that crap finished by June 21st. I kicked its ass so hard that I was able to go through and write new author’s notes for all of the stories, record them, edit them, and add them to the book as well…all before the month ended.

I submitted the book for review on Saturday, and now I’m just waiting for notice that it’s available. When that happens, I’ll make a post about it. Should probably be a few days.

Now, what am I going to do next month? Well, if it’s going to be my vacation month from writing with no specific goals, then I guess I’ll do the same for audio. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to do nothing. I’m already 30% of the way into Three Vampire Weekend, so I will do my best to get as much of that done as I can. I think I can probably get all of the book minus the big novella done this month. The novella, “The Elephant in the Room,” is going to take a month to finish all on its own, so that will likely be my goal for August, when it comes rolling around.

So, I guess I have no list of goals for you, because I’m not pushing for anything this month. I’m just going to do my best, take a little bit of time off, and see what I can do to figure out how to proceed with outlining future projects. I’ll let you know how it went on August 1st or so. Talk to you then.