I had a good solid month for writing in September, with a final word count of 27,533. Even better, the majority of it was not in the fan fiction rewrites project, although I added some words to that.
That’s not to say I don’t think I should be working on fan fiction! It just means that I ended up diversifying a bit. I tend to write better fan fiction when it’s not all that I write, just as I tend to write better in general when it’s not all that I do.
August yielded my highest word count yet, but the majority of it was my Fan Fiction Rewrites project, so I’m not ready to call that an unqualified triumph. The month itself was a bit topsy-turvy for me, anyway. As I write this, I’m very annoyingly not at Dragon Con, as I was too sick to go. I began last week with food poisoning and ended it with something that’s either a cold, fall allergies, or both.
I sometimes quip that I might be in a minority of one: when I first encountered Star Trek, I thought it was a book series.
It happened sometime in 1983, the year I turned eight. I’d been a precocious reader, and was reading at a fifth-grade level by the age of 5. I progressed to standard adult-level reading during that next year; and by a couple of years after that was actually starting to get bored with reading. I could get through an “age appropriate” chapter book in an hour, and through a “teen” level book in an afternoon.
The problem? While my reading ability was well above my chronological age, my social and emotional development were both right in line with it. So was the amount of life experience I’d had at that point. As such, despite the fact that I was hungry for more complicated books, there weren’t that many out there. True “adult” books discussed themes and situations that I didn’t understand — not because I couldn’t read the words, but because I wasn’t yet able to pick up the context.
One afternoon, as I was noodling about being bored, my father was reading M.S. Murdock’s Web of the Romulans and laughing out loud at some points. Intrigued, I asked if I could read it too. Dad thought about it for a moment and decided that it was probably all right for my age. While he finished it, he told me, it would be a good idea for me to go through the Blish Readers he had on our bookshelves.
I did. And I was entranced. To this day I can still remember that the very first episode adaptation I read was “Arena.”
I had an excellent writing month in July. Final word count for the month was 25,353 and I got work done on both of my current large projects (The Perfect Daughter and All That Mattered). In addition, I finished all but the last little bit of the Fan Fiction Rewrites project; at this point, I’m close enough to done to call it “finished,” as the outstanding items require a good bit of reworking before I can post them.
Here’s the full list of everything I got posted in July:
June was a fairly busy month for me, albeit not entirely due to plans. I did make it to The Hollywood Show in Burbank and I had a fantastic time. My flight route was Atlanta-Denver-Burbank, and I wrote a little bit on the Atlanta-Denver leg, but by the time I got on the plane in Denver I was already getting tired and I ended up not writing on that leg, nor on my return route which was an exact reverse. I also ended up not writing at the show.
About a week or so after I got back — just long enough to be sure that I hadn’t brought it back from California — I came down with a cold. As colds go, it was mild, but due to pre-existing issues with my lungs, I don’t tolerate respiratory infections very well. I was down for a good week and am still feeling lingering effects.
I also finally got back on my correct medication regimen shortly after returning from Burbank, and that sometimes affects my creativity for a few weeks while it settles out. As of this writing, I find I’m still in it.
That said, I wasn’t completely unproductive this month. Final word count was 14,924, and it included (but wasn’t necessarily limited to):
While I’m still stuck in idle on The Perfect Daughter — I only managed 414 words of rewriting — I was still fairly busy during May. Final word count for the month was 22,540 against a goal of 20,000, which means that as of this writing I’m currently at 92.84% of my annual goal. In other words, I’m still behind, but I’m managing a pace that will eventually catch me up. In fact, that could come as soon as this month.
So what was I working on instead?
April 2025 was a bit of a rough month for me, writing-wise, and my final word count then was under 2K. I’m pleased to see that, this April, I can at least report a word count of five figures: 13,750 exactly. Unfortunately, that figure only represents a little over seventy percent of my monthly goal, meaning that I’ve fallen behind on catching up the annual goal. As of this writing I’m at 86.45%.
I spent a healthy amount of my writing time going through with self-publishing “Whitewood,” which took a more effort than I thought it would (although I learned a lot, so I’ll be able to shorten the process in the future.) I’ve also created a hard-copy version of Standing in the Dark for anyone who might wish to purchase one, but aside of listing it on this site, I don’t plan to promote it. (I’ve already done some promotion for “Whitewood.”)
I didn’t know about the omegaverse until several months ago, when I was doing some research about fan fiction in general. For those who aren’t aware, in these types of stories, the characters have a defined and hierarchical biological role (alpha, beta, or omega). The relationship dynamics thus resemble those seen in packs of wolves. It originally emerged in explicit stories, but has since moved downstream into less explicit stories. Some might even argue that it’s become mainstream.
I don’t care for it.
At the end of my last writing review post, I noted that I didn’t think I could catch my word count up to where it should be during the month. I was right: I didn’t. But I certainly came close. I was at 53% of goal at the end of February; by the end of March, I was at 94%.
It was a very good month, even though my posting activity on this blog fell by the wayside. I began posting Standing in the Dark on March 1. By doing so, I gave myself both a deadline and an incentive to get it done. It worked: I finished on March 22, and made final adjustments on the 26th, following beta feedback. I posted the last chapter of the story the evening of the 28th. Final word count came in around 80,600, which just barely squeaks into the definition of a novel for the thriller/suspense genre where it would reside if it were not fan fiction.
In my last update, I noted that I had a goals list and a plan for February, and the month started out strong. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay that way. Final word count was 12,982, which was an improvement from January but still short of the goal of 18,500. The more telling statistic, though, is that I wrote 8,887 words (68%) in the first ten days of the month. After that, things fell off dramatically.
This is a pattern I need to remember as I go into March. This said, I’m also taking a few extra steps to work on my ultimate goal of getting my rear end into the seat for writing every single day. From there, my word counts often take care of themselves.