There may be a tiny bit of rounding here. I’m drafting this about a week before New Year’s Eve and trying to set it up so that I’ll just have to change the numbers because I’m not expecting any major changes otherwise. I won’t promise I won’t do any writing after it posts, but it will be the last thing I plan before a quiet family evening.
Total Word Count: 285,131. Up about 23% over 2024, but it’s worth noting that life is different as a grad student and almost 86,000 of that total was in December. I elected to have writing be my primary activity for the Winter Break this year after an otherwise very heavy year of academics.
The fiction side of that works out to about half the word count and includes not just drafting but plotting and editing as well. Editing counts for me work on a net word change for a given day on a given project. Drafting numbers are reasonably impressive for stories finished if we don’t look too closely at average length: 36 pieces of micro-fiction, 14 Flash pieces on top of those, 7 Short Stories, and 3 Novelettes. More than a hundred 2nd or later drafts at various lengths were accomplished this year, though none of those were novels.
The non-fiction side of things didn’t involve a lot of blogging. My tracking says a total of 53 posts, and only six of those from the beginning of the school year or later, four of them in December. Most of the words went into the Memory Project, plus a couple of personal projects one of which was martial arts related and my see the light of day in 2026.
I played with themes a bit this year, originally intending to look at a different kind of writing every month (either genre or form) to stretch myself a bit. Hit a couple, missed a couple, and more or less abandoned the idea in favour of doing better academically and not stressing myself out. Not really planning that for 2026 – the goals are a bit more focused on getting what I’ve got waiting to final edits where needed and getting more things out looking for homes.
Sometime next week, with the year safely started, I’ll share the basic writing goals for the period beginning the day after my 55th birthday and ending with my 56th, which within two days of matching 2026, so might as well be the same.
Be well, everyone.
Life, Writing, Weirdness 
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