Life, Writing, Weirdness

May was a great month for writing. While I haven’t been going to and from campus very much – no course and no TA work and my research essentially just requires me to have an internet connection – the times I have gone in I’ve been mostly unaccompanied. Rather than taking the opportunity to absorb more podcasts, I’ve pushed myself back into dictation. I’ll talk about more how that’s working out on a trip by trip basis and why it’s less painful than it was another day, but for the purposes of the monthly summary, we’ll note that when I went to bed on the 10^th of May, I was 28 words over the entire total for April. That was only 31,863 words, but I did it in ten days instead of thirty.

Now, that doesn’t mean I tripled April’s total last month, but it wasn’t too far off and came in at a more than respectable 82,198 words which brought my YTD total to 228,371 which even if I don’t put another word into the keyboard until next January already makes 2026 the third-best year since I went back to school in 2021. If the pace can be maintained over the whole rest of the year (which, considering I’m supposed to be defending my MSc thesis either the last week of November or the first week of December, is a ridiculous proposition, but dreams are good for you), it projects out to my third-best year ever, and probably still in the top five if my count drops to a trickle after Labour Day, which is what I expect.

The usual breakdown:

• First Draft Fiction: 31.5k words on Heroic Genesis, plus another 5.3k into short fiction, including 5 completed flash pieces.
• I was going to write that I was deep into the scene-level plotting for the first Valkyr Station novel and that there had been a non-zero chance I’d finish by the end of the month. That non-zero chance hit unity just before I left for a summer radio astronomy course in Montreal (where I didn’t get very much writing done), so I’ve started in on book 2 in the series (which will have either five or seven volumes depending on whether I want to leave the future open to the reader’s imagination or provide a final resolution to the overarching conflict. I don’t actually need to have the outlines for this series completed for several years if I don’t want to, but the basis of the story really wants to get out of my head and a zeroth draft is usually a very effective way to do that.
• 16 blog posts hit the website. By the end of the day on the 31^st, I’d also written the first several for June, including this one.
• The Memory Project: 19.9k words. This is where a lot of the dictation has gone and the new dictation process is pretty clean. It’s amazing what a decade of technological development can give you.
• 5 non-haiku poems that haven’t been transcribed yet.
• 1 song, this time a karate-inspired parody of The Happy Wanderer.
• 3 journal entries that weren’t handwritten, not that there were a lot of handwritten ones, either.

Word count summary:

• A total of 36,802 words of new fiction,
• 4,045 words of net change during edits. Still nothing reaching final draft but that’s mostly because I’m holding off and want to do a whole bunch of audio recording under the theory that if my final draft is the “read it out loud” draft anyway, there’s no reason I shouldn’t record it and eventually edit it the audio towards a podcast of some kind.
• 7,436 words of plotting on Valkyr Station Books 1 and 2, which may or may not be on the official goal list for this year but aren’t necessary to further the plan at this point.
• 33,750 words worth of non-fiction, split between the Memory Project, blog posts, poetry, and lyrics for one song (which makes 2 so far this year).

That total of 82,198 words puts this into my top 10 months ever for word production hitting the list at 5^th, just above January 2019 and 3k or so below December 2025.

Be well, everyone.