Okay, yesterday was the last day of January. I had some pretty big goals for the month. How did it come out? Did I beat my all-time best month of writing?
That's the final tally. 41,309. That's pretty good for one month, right? Did I beat my all-time best month? Well, since my all-time best month was last month, December, I can just throw up the charts side by side.
There you have it. Last month hI got 38,046 and this month I got 41,309. That's more than 3,000 words more than my previous record. That's pretty awesome if you ask me. I kicked that record's butt. Here's how it would look put in writing meter form:
That bar just broke right on out of the meter there, because I got 108% of what I was shooting for. That's always fun. Even though I just did this the other day, I'll let you see the year-to-date totals too.
I'm well over 100,000 words for the year now, and my average words for the month were 1,332. That's pretty rad. Here's my progress toward the overall goal.
So, I'm scooting along there as well.
The story that I'm working on, "The Elephant in the Room," is ballooning. When I started it, I expected it to be a typical BD Anklevich short story with something weird happening that eventually leads to an unhappy and hopefully scary ending. Instead, I'm growing this thing bigger and bigger, and looking for a way to give it a more positive ending, at least a hopeful one if not an actual happy one.
Also, I keep coming up with things that need to be explored before calling it quits on the story. At this point, it is at 23,052 words. That's well into novella range, and if I don't watch out, I may well get all the way to novel, which according to the Hugo Awards is anything over 40,000. I don't think I can take it that far, but it's getting up there toward being one of the longest non-novels I've written.
Up until now, that honor belongs to "Do Over" which is 27,357. I remember back when I wrote that story. It took me months to get through, but here I am in 2024, writing a story that's just as long, and doing it in less than three weeks so far. It's kind of crazy how productive you can be if you just make daily goals and actually fulfill them. Whatever your thing is, I encourage you to make some daily goals and work toward them. It'll change your life.
Well, what do I do for next month? Do I take it up to 1,500 words a day? That's something that I may do, but I don't think I want to go there this time. I think I'll hold that for a future month. There are many things that I need to accomplish as an independent author beyond just churning words out.
One of my biggest failures over the years has been never publishing much of my stuff. Last year, I got going on that for a short period, and managed to publish two collections of short stories, and to separately publish all of the stories contained within them. Weirdly, I stopped, and now I think I might have to relearn the process if I want to do it again.
I think I need to get back into that, so my goal for this month is going to be to write 1,250 a day and to publish a story on Amazon a week...or more appropriately four stories this month. Some things might come up this month that might impede the story a week thing, so I'm going to hedge my bets and give myself a chance to catch up on the days when I can for the days when I can't.
So, watch for that. Each story, as I publish it, will get a blog post on here, so you can track my progress, and see how I'm doing. Feel free to chide me if you see that I've slacked off way too much. That's always helpful to tell you the truth. We'll see if I can't get everything that I've written published, even down to the novels like Sunny & Gray.
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