The Return of the Monthly Writing Report

I used to do these, sometimes even weekly, to keep myself completely honest about the progress I’d made for the month. That’s still what these will be about, but I’m going back to monthly. On or about the first of the month, I’ll look at things in terms of the actual goals I’ve set for 2024. So far, things have been just about getting back into the grove and so there are a few goals I haven’t touched yet. There are also a couple of secret goals that I’ll trumpet if I hit them.

For this month, I’ll look at things purely in terms of what I wrote or did, and tie each thing to the targets I laid out in the 2024 Goal List I posted earlier this month.

Raw Word Count: 29,759. I didn’t actually put the target word count for the year in that post but based on the starting point that I want to get at least 500 words of new stuff into the computer every day, I’m looking for 183,000 words for the year. Discounting January, and doing a little rounding, that means I’m looking for about 16,600 words per month. No issues here for May.
Of those words, 4,673 have been towards a novelette that is the first in a series of stories, “An Infestation of Imps”. Secondary world fantasy.
Another 6,877 have gone into the opening chapters of a superhero novel, Power Genesis. That’s my third mediocre working title. It will have something decent by the end of the first draft.
Rough plotting of two novels is complete, but neither one of them in enough detail that I can consider the goal met.
13 blog posts, counting this one. It posts on the first of June but the calendar still said May when I wrote most of it. All that was left to do on June 1^st was to replace the placeholder numbers with exact counts, and maybe add a sentence or two of extra commentary somewhere.
Work on a couple of different volumes of the Memory Project. These aren’t going to be for public consumption, but I still regard them as creative pursuits in a lot of ways. Using words to represent things I remember from various points in my life so that they aren’t boring to read. Well, that’s the plan, at least.
I’ve finished the refresh on exactly one of my existing indie works (Ancient Runes). The initial book is taking much longer than I’d hoped because the thumb drive I kept things on has disappeared and the backup I thought I made doesn’t seem to have any of my publishing files present. Annoying, but not the end of the world and gave me the chance for a true and complete rebuild, which is probably a good thing. Original covers are all backed up online, though I intend to do new ones for a handful of these stories. I’ve done one already: the e-book refresh is complete with a new cover for Draugr Rising but I still need to do a revised cover for the paperback version.
Five story submissions went out in the last couple of days of May against a modest goal of thirty for the year.

So there’s the basic list of accomplishments for May. In June, I hope to make a lot more progress on the publishing side of things to go along with whatever the word count winds up being.

Worth noting that every goal I originally mentioned also has a couple of levels of secret stretch goals built into the background. These will certainly get mentioned if I hit them.

Be well, everyone.