Thursday, March 21, 2024

Two Thirds

Okay, the second third of the month is over. That's a weird sentence, right? Anyway, we've made it two thirds of the way through March. How is my progress coming along on the goals I set for myself with writing and publishing? Well, here's my chart for the month so far.

I've managed to plug away each and every day until I made it to my minimum words, which is 1,333 right now, so that means I'm still ahead of my goal to outdo my biggest month ever. As long as I don't falter, I should beat my previous record month...which was January. That month, I wrote 41,309. So, my goal is to get to 41,310. What's my percentage? Let's look at the writing meter.

28157 / 41310 (68.16%)

So, 68% is a little bit above two thirds. That means I'm doing just fine.

How is the whole year coming along? Well, let's look at the full chart.


Alright, so I'm at 172,986. That's a pretty big number. That's a pretty good ways toward achieving my final goal of 304,475. Not that I need to, but I'll show the meter for that too.

172986 / 304475 (56.81%)

56% of the way there on that one. It's a long way from halfway through the year too. So, I'm doing great.

Looking at that number of 172,986, I can see that I'll be over 200,000 by the end of next month. That's going to be pretty awesome. I'm excited to reach that. I'll make sure to make a celebratory post when I hit that landmark.

Also, even though my goal for each day of March is 1,333, my average is actually above 1,400. That's pretty awesome. I'm going to see if I can't keep it up there. That would be neat to finish out the month at that point...although I was thinking of making 1,400 my goal for next month. Maybe I should purposefully throw it, so that seems like a good goal to shoot for instead of me not stretching myself.

So, what have all those words gotten me? Well, since starting this, I've written a novel, a novella, and a novelette. Those are "Caught Up in Christmas," "The Elephant in the Room," and, "Karma Is My Boyfriend," respectively. I'm getting really close to finishing up my second novel of the year as well, which still doesn't have a satisfactory title, but has the working title of "Love Walks In." That's a pretty good output, right?

Okay, now, there's a few other goals that I set for myself in March. They involved publishing stories in one form or another. First of all, I was supposed to publish at least eight stories as eBooks over on Amazon. Of course, if you read my last report, then you saw that I am way above that already. As of last time, I had published 15 stories in March. 

Since that day? Well, I've gotten four more since that day...with a fifth published, but still not listed because it's in limbo with Amazon. They don't want to let me publish "Last Contact," because Rish Outfield already published it, and they think I might be trying to steal his work and pass it off as my own. I've been trying to appease them with a signed contract from me and Rish that says we each have non-exclusive rights to publish the story, but so far, they haven't budged. We'll see.

That means that I've done 19...basically 20 stories this month. There's really only one more to go. I wrote a novelette called "Undo," about a kid who finds a magic stopwatch that gives him the ability to go back in time one minute. However, he doesn't really have a strong moral compass, and it takes him down a very dark road. That story may possibly be published before the month is out. I'm going to have to do a little editing on that one. I haven't looked at it at all since I finished writing it a few years ago.

Beyond that, the only other non-novel that I have finished but not published is "The Elephant in the Room." That one definitely won't make it out this month. It'll take at least another month to get that one ready, but that may be one of my goals for next month. I really want to have all of my work published, and I'm determined to keep at it. Once the short stories are done, I'll get working on the novels.

So, I had already crushed that goal of eight stories in March by last update, but I crushed it a little further, grinding it into the ground mercilessly in the time since.

What else? Anything? Oh, there's one more thing. I made the goal to publish my first audiobook over on Audible this month. I was working on editing the last story for it when the month began. I finished that before the last update, and all I needed was to set up an account and do a little editing to portion off the chapters into separate files for upload. However, I did none of that in the last ten days. Instead, I put all my work into getting my podcast episode ready for this month, so I'm no closer to achieving that goal than I was last time. 

I gotta get going on this one, or it's going to be the one that got away. It would be kind of dumb to go so overboard on the publishing eBooks goal as to do 20 stories when I only had to do 8, but fall flat on my face and do nothing with the other goal. Gotta get moving.

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