Everyone on the Internet is doing the “Happy New Year” themed posts. So, Happy New Year!

OK, now on to the serious stuff. The rough draft for Book 2 of the Traveler series, known as Survivor, is 72% completed. I’ve been hammering out words every day this week, so I’m already almost 7,000 words ahead of schedule. I’ll be switching to book 3 before I finish this one, so I’ll be doing scenes out of order, then going back and putting in connecting scenes in book 2 to set things up for book 3. It’s a lot like writing one giant book. That’s how I’m treating this at the moment. According to my schedule, I should have the rough draft done by the end of February. There will be a huge announcement when I reach that point.

I entered my final writing stats yesterday (4,514 words) and queried the total for the year. In 2023, I wrote a total of 479,442 words. That is the number of words written for all the books I published. In 2022, I wrote 466,550 words, so I managed to write more words in 2023 than the previous year, though only a tiny bit more. I’m going to shoot for 500k words this year. I should be able to beat it. It’s only (yeah, only) 20,000 more words. Just a short story on top of my normal novel writing.

If you divide the total words by the days in the year, it comes out to an average of 1,313 words per day. I wish I could get it up to 2k on average, but I’d have to set my daily target to 3k per day, and I’m not sure that’s achievable. Certainly not while working a full-time job. I’ll settle for 500k words for the year. When I look at the days that I write, there is always a gap between books when I’m planning the next book. Maybe I can squeeze in some planning time after I fill my daily quota. Then I can go directly into the next book without a break in between. My scheduling, which seems to work pretty well, includes a quota for every day of the week. 2,00 words on weekdays and 3,000 words on weekends. I might adjust that to put in a day off and spread those words across the weekdays. Then I can get ahead by working the extra zero day if I need to.

Words are just a measurement, and they’re not important in comparison to the story. So, no matter what, I have to make the story good. That comes from the planning, editing, and the Read-Out-Loud phases. The only reason I worry about tracking my words is that the rough draft phase takes the most man-hours. If I don’t motivate myself to put in the time, then the books will never get done. So far, it works and I’m able to determine a schedule and a deadline that I can achieve. This means that I can announce when a book will be published and get it published on time.

Here’s to hoping that 2024 is as productive for storytelling as 2023 was.