Novenas & Novellas

May was certainly an…interesting month. While I had specific plans, they’re not at all what happened. At the same time, I can’t say that May was a bust either, especially since I did hit my word count goal for the month: 21,373 words written against a goal of 19,000 words.

But while I did get the outline of Headwaters done, as assigned, every time I started drafting I found myself making excuses. I needed to update a web site. I had a random idea about Legends Lost. I did a scaled-down relaunch of the professional blog. I even reorganized the writing file folders on my computer. Bottom line, even though I kept opening the Scrivener project, I only wrote three scenes.

By mid-month, I’d figured out that my subconscious was probably trying to tell me something.

All right! I finally shouted at my muse. I’ll go ahead and work on A New Horizon since you want me to so badly! But then we’re doing something original. You hear me? We are not only writing fan fiction this year!

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April was a planned “rest and reset” month after going full-speed through January, February, and March to finish All That Mattered. At the beginning of the month, it actually took me several days to downshift out of that mode, but by mid-April I had done what I intended. Even with that, though, my word count of 19,602 was more than the monthly goal, so I’m still well on track toward my annual goal.

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In my last monthly update post, I set a goal of 18 writing days per month for the rest of 2026, and I mentioned that I’m also seeking a sustainable pace.

What does that mean in real-world terms?

February 2026 gave me a good answer.

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I’ve been tracking my writing stats since 2024, and in the past two years, January was a light month. Not so this year. As of this writing, my word count is 33,039 for the month — and note that it’s not quite over yet. Unlike December, this time, my writing pace was steady, which means this word count figure is actually a bit of a slowdown.

But I don’t think that slowdown is a bad thing, given that burnout is real. And toward the end of the month, I was feeling it a little anyway. This last week, I’ve intentionally backed off a little…but only a little, and only enough to tune and calibrate a bit. The idea is to write at a sustainable pace for the entire twelve months. That’s why, despite the extremely strong month, I’ve decided not to change my original annual goal of 225,000 words.

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I’m now almost eight weeks into my new life, and for a while I was despairing about being able to pick the writing back up. But then, all of a sudden, it picked back up dramatically — to the point that, in December 2025, I logged my third-highest monthly word count in 2025 at 28,079.

Virtually all of that word count came on or after December 16th. Nearly eleven thousand of it happened between the time I signed off the day job on December 24th and the time I signed back in on December 29th.

That is definitely a comeback — and with a roar! It wasn’t quite enough to make up for the deficit I accumulated in October and November, but it came close. Given the reasons for the deficit, I’m calling the month a win, particularly since I hit another goal: finishing up Never But Maybe before the end of the year.

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November 2025 very much did not go as I’d expected, and my writing output shows it, clocking in with a word count under two thousand.

I’m keeping the details and reasons between us, but my husband and I separated early in the month. I’m the one who moved out, and since there was nothing keeping me in Georgia, I came back home to Eastern North Carolina. I spent exactly half the month — fifteen days — living in a hotel before moving into a beautiful 1910s-era house in a small town. It has way more square footage than I need, but it’s well-built and extremely walkable.

The long-distance move and keeping up with the paid job took up nearly all of my time and energy in November. I’m just now beginning to reflect, regroup, and figure out what I want to do next.

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Last year, around this same time, I noted a dip in my writing productivity and I attributed it to a tooth infection and traveling. This year, I didn’t have such handy excuses, but the dip in productivity happened anyway.

While I am going to note that I experienced a major depressive phase this month (one that I’m still not sure I’m completely out of), I find it interesting to see that it once again happened right around the time the seasons changed. It’s equally interesting to note some of the things I did by way of trying to get out of it:

• I began to keep a personal/spiritual handwritten journal again;
• I made several posts on this site’s blog; and
• I even started a new blog that focuses on an aspect of my non-writing life.

Clearly, then, the problem was not a lack of writing productivity itself, although my word count was the lowest it’s been this year. Instead, it’s a situation of my creativity, particularly as it regards fiction, taking a nose-dive.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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