Okay, folks, it's time for my report on the first third of March. I set myself some pretty lofty goals for this month. Am I keeping up with them or have I already fallen on my face with a thud and a crunch? Well, to start with, let's remember what my goals were. First of all, I was supposed to get an average of 1,333 words per day, to beat my best month ever, where I averaged 1332.5 words a day. How did I do?
As you can see, I did just fine. I upped my minimum from 1,250 that I had it at last month to 1,333. So, basically I wasn't allowed to stop until I reached it. Therefore, I nailed it every day. I even went over into the 1400s some days. I haven't gotten so into it that I went to 1500 at all yet, though. Maybe I'm reaching some sort of limit, though I don't think so. I think I can keep going for a while if I want to.
I may take it as far as I can sometime soon. I was thinking about trying it one day. If I used every last minute of free time I have in a day to write, how many words could I get? If I dictated on my way to work and way home, and wrote on my lunchbreak, and wrote in the morning before going to work, and wrote while walking for exercise, and so forth, how many words could I muster? I'm really curious to find out, and some day I'll force myself to try it for at least one day.
So, how am I doing in my progress toward beating my record best month? Let's see the meter!
Okay, I'm 33.73%. That's just a smidge above one third of the way there. We're at ten days, which is not quite one third of the way, since there are 31 days in March. So, I think I'm doing pretty good.
How's the year-to-date looking? Here's all the months I've been at this all stacked up.
That's six months, but it's not really six months. I only did four days in October, and I've only done ten days in March. So, it's more like four and a half months. However, did you notice the total for the year so far? 158,763! I'm over the 150,000 mark! That's pretty sweet. It makes me happy. Not only that, but my goal that I'm shooting for is 304, 475, because that would beat the best year I've ever had for writing. Half of that is 152,237.5, or for simplicity's sake we'll say it's 152,238. 158, 763, my total that I'm at so far this year, is already higher than that. That means I'm more than half way to beating my goal. Again, let me remind you that this was accomplished with only four and a half months not six. So, I'm doing really good.
I did add a little field to the spreadsheet that tell me my percentage toward the goal just under the line for the number remaining. I don't know if I even need the meter anymore with that field on there telling me that I'm at 52.14%, but I'll put it on here anyway. It's always fun to have a visual representation.
Okay, so that's how the writing is coming along. Pretty darn good. I'm cruising my way through the story that I started last month about a guy who falls in love with an alien. It's a story I've been saving up for ages, and I thought that now was the perfect time to get it written. I'm writing enough that I'll probably actually finish it. It's at 39,525 words right now, which means tomorrow it will cross over the threshold into novel territory, at least according to the Hugo Awards. Anything over 40,000 is a novel for their awards. I think they're a good enough authority to go with, even if 40,000 is a pretty short novel. This one will probably be that as well. I'm betting that I may finish the book up by the next time we talk. If not, I'll be pretty close.
Okay, now, I made other goals in my end of the month post from last month too. How are those going? Well, first of all, what were they? Well, I also pledged to publish at least eight stories on Amazon this month. How is that going?
Well, looking at my dashboard over there, I haven't published eight stories. No, I have published fifteen! So, here's my meter for publishing.
That meter sticks way over the edge of the page, eh? I'm 187.5% of the way to my goal! Yeah, baby!
Just because, I'm going to list all the fifteen stories I published here. In fact, let me show you the covers they were published with.
So there you go. Fifteen stories published so far in March. I haven't even managed to put out an announcement for all of them yet. The posts are still forthcoming, since I only want to do one story a day, but you can already find them all over at Amazon.
There's only about five stories left and I'll have published every short story I've written that is even somewhat fit to share with the general public. A few of them I'm not certain are even fit to share, but I'm doing it anyway. I've heard a few people give the advice that authors need to stop self-rejecting. So many times, we look at our stories and think they aren't good enough, crowd-pleasing enough, literary enough to put out to the public, and so we keep them locked away. Well, all I can say is that you never know.
I wrote a story years ago called, "Dear Santa." I think it's middling, but since I did a compilation of all Christmas stories, I included it. After all, I needed all the pages I could get in that book. The only review I've gotten on the book so far came from Dave Wallace, who raved about "Dear Santa." He loves the story. I was on the verge of not including it, but it's his favorite, so you never know what will appeal to who. Don't self-reject. Just publish it all, and that's what I'm going to do.
Okay, onto the last goal of March. The final goal was to publish my first audiobook on Audible. I was nearly finished with all the audio for Christmas Creatures, my Christmas collection that I just mentioned. How is the progress toward that? Well, I did finish the rest of the audio. It is recorded and edited. So, I have all eight hours of the book ready to publish. That's a huge deal!
However, the more daunting part of the process (at least to me) lies ahead. I have to create an account and do all the rigamarole to get it on there. That's what I have left for that goal. I still haven't started on that. I've been using all my spare time publishing the short stories, so I haven't gotten very far on the audio. I will get that done before the month is out. Then I will get started narrating and editing the last two stories that need to be recorded to get my other short story collection published. Maybe that will be April's goal. We'll see. For now, we'll just stick with Christmas Creatures.
So, that's the first ten days of this month. I'm doing pretty good, and feeling pumped about it all. Hopefully, I can keep that up for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, I don't get burned out and quit in a huff. That's what I usually do, but I'm going to buck that trend. This is the all-new Big Anklevich here folks. I ain't going away. Get used to it.
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