Life, Writing, Weirdness

June was a tougher month than May. It was still productive, but not so much for fiction and in part because I managed to get a little extra dictation in, making up for the day I missed entirely. Certain family events had me on the road a lot more than would be normal and not in a dictation or even drafting friendly way when it wasn’t my turn to drive.

When all is said and done, June’s total was solid overall at 53,706 words which does still make it my second-best month for 2026 so far and bring the YTD up to 282,077 words. And that makes 2026 my second-best year for writing since returning to higher education in early 2021, and only be a couple of thousand words.

The usual breakdown:

• First Draft Fiction: 12.3k words on Heroic Genesis, plus another 3.0k into short fiction, including the last ¾ of a short story called “I Should Have Seen It Coming When the Grolnip Died”.
• I have two main character arcs left to describe for the second Valkyr Station novel before I drop into the basic scene listing that I’ll later expand to an actual set of scene descriptions. Not a lot of progress here this month, but I’m likely not likely to start drafting these until at least early 2028 unless I suddenly feel the need to push them higher up the priority list.
• A mere 7 blog posts up, although I’ve written a couple of the posts for early July.
• The Memory Project: 26.3k words.
• 9 non-haiku poems that haven’t been transcribed yet.
• 1 song, this time current events -inspired parody of A Few of My Favourite Things.
• 3 journal entries that weren’t handwritten, and I didn’t manage to get back to the physical book this month.

Word count summary:

• A total of 15,263 words of new fiction,
• 1,801 words of net change during edits. Most of it finishing the 2^nd draft of the Hauntings of Fiona and the rest on the revision notes and second draft of “Cold Sleep”, which is likely to get close to novelette length by the time it gets to final draft status.
• 3,771 words of plotting on Valkyr Station Books 2.
• 32,871 words worth of non-fiction, split between the Memory Project, blog posts, poetry transcriptions (because these are basically always written long hand, and lyrics for one song (which makes 2 so far this year).

That total of 53,706 made June a solid month. I have a conference during the last week in July so expect it to be lower, and there are still other things going on IRL. We’ll see how things work out.

Be well, everyone.