January writing round-up

Writing

Inspired by, among others, NJ Fraser and Cherie Priest, I’m going to try out the idea of putting my actual word-like progress into stats and round-ups on this here blogging thingamy. I’ve been tracking my daily words through spreadsheets for a couple of years. It helps me stay accountable to myself and cheers me up when I think that I’ve had a bad month and see the progress I really made despite some bad days.

This year, I’ve also set up a spreadsheet to see a month-by-month comparison of how I’m doing. And thus, monthly progress reports!

Total new words for January: 20,369

This is a month where I lost several days to a wonky back and didn’t get off to my usual flying start due to New Year being very New Year. That total looks absolutely smashing to me, when I take all of that into account. Yes, I have usually been closer to 30k per month, but 20k looks great. And even at this rate, a first draft of an average novel is achievable in four to five months from start to finish.

Not all of those words were actually on the novel. A couple of thousand were on fanfic, and a few more thousand were on a novelette. I added ~14k to the novel, so it’s now just over 56k, which still feels pretty great after all the issues I’ve had this month.

My aim for February is to achieve around the same. If I get more, I’ll be delighted. If all 20k are on the novel, I’ll be over the moon. If I get less…well, I’ll assess why it was less at the end of February.

For now, I’m just going to celebrate that January wasn’t as much of a disaster as it felt, and see what February brings.

Published by Katherine Jay

Katherine Jay was born and raised in England before fleeing to Canada, where she lives in a wind-swept house with two cats and too many books. In her spare time, she reads, writes, and watches good SFF and terrible disaster movies. She can be found on Twitter @stompydragons.

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2 thoughts on “January writing round-up”

    1. Everyone writes at their own pace! I’m always incredibly inspired by your pace when you’re doing NaNo. While I can–and have–had occasional 3.5k word days, that’s the most I’ve managed in one day and it’s a pace that I can’t sustain even for 30 days. Putting in significantly more than 1k a day consistently tends to lead me into burn out after a few weeks.

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