Year Ender

I suppose, after all of the talk I've done for this year about my goal for writing, that I have to do a post about this. I'll be a little bit brief, because I will be talking about this in my Patreon Address this month, of course. 

I said last time, that everybody would get access to my Patreon Address just that one time and then it would be for Patreon subscribers only, but then archive.org went down, and that post never went out. So, I'm going to try it again, if I can. I still haven't been able to log into my archive.org account, so I don't think we can upload stuff to it yet. If that does become available again, then my Patreon Address will go out to everybody in a timely manner. If not, then I guess you gotta get on the Patreon to hear it.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about archive.org or anything like that. I'm here, because my one year for my writing effort just passed. I made the goal on my birthday in 2023. My goal was to have my best year of writing ever. Up until this year, that would have been the year from birthday-to-birthday in 2019-2020. That gave me the goofy goal of getting 304,475 because my total for 2019-2020 was 304,474.

Maybe I don't need to talk about reaching the end of this year, because I already talked about beating that goal back in June. After that, I took a big, ill-advised break in July and August, and had to recommit myself to writing in September. I gave myself a new, augmented goal to attempt for the rest of the year until my birthday arrived in late October. Now, I was trying to hit 380,000 for the year.

How did that go? Well, here's my final word count for the whole 2023-2024 birthday-to-birthday year:

Yeah, I hit the 380 goal. I didn't have a lot of room to spare, but I managed. So, my new best year ever total is 381,054. If I want to improve, I have to beat that.

So, what am I doing now? Taking another break and disappearing for months on end? No!

Instead, I'm trying to up it just a little bit more. First of all, I'm doing something I probably should have done a while ago. I'm dumping this whole birthday-to-birthday thing. No more hyphenated years. I'm switching to a standard calendar. And I'll start with this year. I'm taking everything that I've written in 2024 so far, and continuing from there. So, my year looks like this right now:

You can zoom in and see the info on that if you want, but let me show you the important part.

Okay, that's my total for what we've had of 2024 so far. And, as you can see, I gave myself a new goal. I wanted to beat my best year ever, so I'm going to outdo 381,054. I won't do it stupidly this time around by setting my goal at 381,055 though. Instead, this time I'm taking it a a ways above that. I want to see if I can't manage to get to 400,000 for 2024.

As you can see, that means that I have 83,905 words to write in two months and four days. That means I've got to kick it up a notch. I wrote a thousand words a day...aside from my birthday, which I took a holiday from writing...in October. I'll only get a little over 30,000 words for the month doing that, however. What I'm going to need is 40,000 word months in November and December.

That is not out of the realms of possibility, though. If you look at the totals of the months from 2024, I got more than 40,000 words in January, March, April, May, and June.  I know I can do it. I've just got to work a little bit harder. In January, I set my word count goal to 1,250 per day. I think I'll have to do that again. And, of course, I'll have to do it every day of the month, no breaks, probably not even Christmas.

So, we're off. Can I get 80,000 words in the final two months of the year and set a new all-time high benchmark? It'll be tough. It'll be a stretch for me to achieve that, but it's definitely possible, and I believe in myself enough to say that I can do it.

Once I crush that goal, then we can look at what even-higher benchmark I can shoot for in 2025. 500,000? That sounds like insanity, but maybe...