“You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals.”

Booker T. Washington

It’s update time!!!

According to WordKeeperAlpha, where I log my words, I made the 250.000 words I set out to do on August 7th. I don’t know if that’s true since I don’t log my words every day, I do them in batches, but it could be 😊

This last month, I wrote 26.998 words, so not bad but not awesome either. My personal life is in upheaval, so I’m quite pleased with those 27k, though. Had I known, that I only needed to write two more words to make 27k, I would have, but as I said, I log the words in batches, so I didn’t know I was that close.

I’ve written 269.306 words total during 2022, and this morning, I signed the contract for Holly’s 12th story of the year, so yay! That’s two goals reached in the same month 🥳

My daily word count is 1090, which I’m also quite pleased with since I have days when I don’t add words at all. I haven’t written a word for close to a week now, only done some edits, so that’s pretty great.

When my brain starts working again – if it ever will – I’ll reevaluate my plan. The original one was to write some short stories for Ofelia, but the harsh reality is that Ofelia hardly sells anything, so my time might be better invested if I start on Holly’s 2023 instead. Ofelia has a story coming out in December, and while it’s a long wait… I guess this is one of the downsides of having two names. But, I’ll sit down and make a plan when I have some brainpower.

 It’s harder to stay on top than it is to make the climb. Continue to seek new goals.

– Pat Summitt

Update time!!! I’ve eh… lost myself in a bowl of colourful M&Ms, I’m afraid. I’m quite frantically working on Holly’s October story. It was supposed to be done already. I told my lovely publisher that I was writing a story for National M&M Day, and they wrote me into the release schedule. I said it would be quick and easy – colourful little chocolates should make for a quick and easy story, right?

Ah, this is life as a… discovery writer 😆 We’re now 51.637 words into a rather dark tale about a rescued blood slave and his vampire. Yup, exactly how I’d planned it 🙄 But there is chocolate.

Every single word of those 51.637 words I’ve written since the last update post. I’ve also added a little to my advent stories, not a lot, just a little fiddling. All in all, I’ve written 52.192 since last month.

That leaves me with a total of 242.308 words. Since I’ve told WordKeeperAlpha (where I keep my stats) that my goal is 250.000 words this year, it says I only have to write 7.692 more words. I can tell you that I will write more than that since I haven’t done Holly’s November story yet. I haven’t even decided which day to write about. I need to get out of my M&M addiction before I make a decision 😊

On average, I’ve written 1106 words per day, which is pretty good since there are days when I don’t write a single word. And I’m predicted to reach my goal of 250.000 words on August 18th. We’ll see about that. It all depends on how many more words I need to finish the M&M story. I don’t think I’ll need 7k, it’s almost wrapped up, and once I’ve reached the end, the revising starts and that normally doesn’t generate a lot of words. I add some words, but I also delete a lot of words. We’ll see next month if I’ve reached 250.000 words or not 😁 either way, I think I might need to reassess.

How are you doing with your goals? Is it time to reassess?