200,000 Words
by 
So far this year.
Not bad. It ticked over somewhere during my work on Converging Destiny. It’s been harder than I expected to slip back into the narrative, but the 30k I’d written before I went through the ‘figuring out my head’ journaling period I went through last year reads pretty well. I expect the first chapter or two to be a struggle to find the same voice, and will probably get stretched out too far in time as a result, but the rest of the plot reads clearly and I think I’ll manage to finish the first draft in the time I’ve projected. The plan is to dive into Unified Destiny right after, which I also have fully plotted, though I’m not afraid to deviate.
But, 200k this year. Granted, most of that is post COVID, but at least I’m getting some writing done, yes? I’m hoping to beat my average year by December 31st. Mathematically, that’s a little less than 351k, but that tends to be mostly drafting and I’m definitely trying to spend the lion’s share of my creative time on editing right now, mostly because I usually spend it drafting.
The breakdown this year so far (and I’m carrying only to July 31st, so just past 200k), by word count is something like:
38% Fiction
21% Editing
3% Plotting
38% Non-Fiction (mainly blog posts)
The editing piece is a bit staggering, really. I count editing on a net change basis. While that’s usually positive, it isn’t always, and a net change of, say, 100 words, isn’t necessarily representative of a specific time spent editing. Things get changed, rearranged, edited, deleted. 100 words’ worth of difference might have taken five minutes or it might have taken an hour or more. It’s not meaningless, exactly, but it’s meaning is variable.
And there’s something about my mental makeup that requires me being able to attach numbers to things. It’s important to be able to track progress, though, to me if no one else.
200,000 words.
Yeah, I’m happy with that.
Stay safe and be well, everyone.
by
