I tracked all my words on the NaNoWriMo website last year, so this should be relatively simple!
I think I'll leave the self-publishing DoT work out of this post and make a separate post a little later. This will just be words written.
January--FtC and YBaB
I started January 2022 by finishing the 1st draft of my NaNoWriMo 2021 winner FtC (which was since lost to the gods of technology). I had a little left at the end of December so I set myself a goal to finish it in the first weekend of January.
November and December on FtC looked like this:
Then for January 1 and 2 I managed this:
Big start to the year! The final word count was 88,522...and now it's gone, all gone! :'(
That's okay. Learn from my mistake--back up everything, even things on the cloud. This was in my google drive like all my work has been for the last 6 or so years after I lost a whole manuscript worth of edits to a malfunctioning USB drive. But somehow, still lost from the cloud!
Sad story aside, that brings me to January 3rd, 2022! I set a goal from January 3-February 3 to write the novella idea that had been kicking around in my head since the end of 2020.
1 month, 27,000 words! And once again, I did it.
I'll take a moment here to say that before November 2021 I didn't write like this. I barely wrote at all. I still plan to write a blog post about how I changed that, but the simple story is: writing sprints. Sprinting and not editing as I went along.
YBaB's first draft topped out at the number above--27,004 words. I had expected it to be around 30,000 words and I knew it was slightly underwritten, but given that I underwrite everything, and usually to a much greater degree, I was pretty happy with the word count!
February--DoT
I spent the rest of February doing detail edits on DoT :D.
March, April, and May--3T
This is where things started to fall apart. Half due to circumstances beyond my control, and half due to the rather outrageous schedule.
I planned to write 90K words of 3T from March until the end of May! 3 months to write 90,000 words. It seemed possible, because I had just written 115,526 words in 3 months...buuuut this is where I learn a little bit about how goals motivate me and how that can either lead to great things or devastation lol.
Oof. Big failure.
I wrote 52K of those words by the last week of April, and then some personal life issues got in the way. Rallied at the end of May for 3 extra K for the total of 55,012 you see above.
The best thing to come out of this was that I realised the psychology of failing that 90K goal hurt more than actually failing it. I had 55K words! That's pretty good! But seeing that incomplete blue bar...hmm. So instead of making the next goal the other 90K words, I broke it up! I also wrote in June, which was supposed to be my month off. That turned it into a no-pressure writing month!
June--3T
I planned for 5K words for June, just to get back into things.
And I got 20,018! :D.
July, August, September, and October--3T and YBaB
So when I was supposed to do the second 90K from July to end of September, I changed tactics and instead planned it month by month.
Which worked a lot better. 3T's first draft was supposed to be 180,000 words long. Or at least that's what I was hoping for. The final version is probably going to be between 230,000-250,000 words so I wanted to fight my natural underwriting instinct and end up with a better fleshed out first draft than what I'm left with, but I'm still definitely improving! DoT's first draft was likely shorter although the actual word count is lost to time.
The final count, achieved by mid-September, is 150,961 words!
I also edited YBaB during this period. Since I knew it was underwritten I made a word count goal for it as well.
Hoping for 2K, ending up with an addition of 6,182 words.
These edits were done on a goal planned from August 1st to October 24th (the end of a novella submission period I hoped to hit). The word additions looked like this!
The last big jump was October 5th, with a tiny bit done later in October. I submitted YBaB to two small presses in mid-October and am waiting on replies :).
November--NaNoWriMo for TTN
I've posted about this one already, but I won NaNoWriMo for the 2nd time ever (and in a row) with TTN.
The pattern should be clear at this point that with the bigger goals I just barely surpass them by a sentence or two and then stop in exhaustion hahahah.
December--TTN and too much DoT
I tried to replicate my last year's success with FtC for TTN and finish the draft through December but it wasn't meant to be. I made a goal of 15,000 words, actually expecting to get 25,000 words or more, and...I got 7,500.
Now, because I am sneaky and I don't like those blue bars of failure, I actually extended this goal to January 15th. I haven't written anything since the end of December but I still have a little time! TTN is extremely underwritten (shocker) but I do think it's a much smaller story than my other novels, though it was always meant to be a novel and not a novella. I'm expecting the readable 2nd draft to end up around...80K-90K words. Itsy bitsy standalone Fantasy...maybe perfect for...querying? :D.
I spent the non-writing portion of December planning birthday parties and Christmas, and finalising the interior for DoT's ebook and physical copies! There are now eARCs and even physical ARCs for DoT! Wooo!
2023
Looking forward to 2023, I don't think there will be anywhere near this much writing. I have a month-to-month calendar planned like last year and mostly it's editing 3T. As far as writing goes, I'll finish the 1st draft of TTN in the next week or two, and then I'll try to write my second novella in March. Then nothing until I start the 1st draft of the 3rd CotT book--F&G--in the summer. Although it does look like I'm also supposed to FINISH that draft in 2023...which seems like a lot so we'll see! Haha.
I go back to work on February 13th, and the main goal for this year is to publish DoT on time (May 1 :D) and see where that takes me. If this ends up being the year of enjoying my debut and editing its sequel (3T) I'll be pretty happy with that!
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