Oh, wow. Did I ever drop the ball when it came to writing in January 2025. Final word count for the month was 7,697 (against a goal of 20K).
It seems it’s time for a reset. Fortunately, February is starting on a Saturday which means that I have a very real opportunity to start the month strong — and that’s my plan.
On November 30th, I noted that I’d had a little bit of irregularity in my writing thanks to some real life issues getting in the way, and I concluded with a challenge to myself to hang on to the momentum I’d found toward the end of the month, and to increase it a little, in December.
Oh, wow. Did I ever. December, with 34,294 words, became my 2024 month with the highest word count. A good bit of this was composing blog posts that went up during the first half of the month, as well as revising two shared-universe stories that had previously been accepted. I also did a good bit of work on Standing in the Dark, particularly during the last weekend of the month.
In my last post, I stated that, even though I’m not doing NaNoWriMo anymore, I wanted to designate November as a focus month for writing anyway:
To that end, I’m committing to writing something every single day. I’m not going to worry about specific word counts, because I know my writing habits well enough to know that that will take care of itself if I just get my rear end into my seat.
After a really strong September — during which I had my second over-30K month this year — things got a little weird during October. But, by the time the month ended, I was putting things back together and I’ve since been able to pick up my usual writing pace again.
My biggest event, of course, was SMucK-a-Palooza during the last weekend of September. I was really excited about getting to go, and things went fine until the day I was scheduled to fly up. That day, September 26, also went down in history as the date that Hurricane Helene made landfall in the United States*.
I was a relatively early adopter of National Novel Writing Month (now known as NaNoWriMo). I made my first attempt at the challenge in 2001. Over the next several years, my participation waxed and waned, but I finally reached my first official 50,000-word success in 2017. (I had previously won with self-defined goals a couple of times.)
By that time I’d become a semi-active member of NaNoLanta, and I still have a small stuffed panda in my writing area with a collar that says “Writing is My Superpower.” I won again in 2018, but by then some other parts of my life were changing and I was becoming far less involved with NaNoLanta. I participated in 2019 and 2020, but I did not win.
And then came 2021.
August was a quiet month for me in terms of writing seminars and activities, but that meant I had more time to get drafting done, and my word count for the month reflects that; it was higher than July’s. I’m also enthused because, for the first time in 2024, my average daily word count has gone above 500 words per day for the year to date. It didn’t happen until the 28th, and it’s only just barely which means I need to keep the momentum going, but it did happen and, as of this writing, is still the case.
That’s been carrying me through as I realize that I’m way behind on Standing in the Dark, to the point that right now I don’t expect I’m going to finish it by my self-imposed December 31st deadline. However, that’s not yet carved in stone. I have weekend writing retreats scheduled for both September and October, and while I’m not formally participating in NaNoWriMo, I’m doing it informally by setting a high word goal for that month.