Sep 26, 2024
My goal for the next twelve months is to write an average of 1,000 words per day. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but life gets busy from time to time and it might not always be possible to write.
I have done my best to minimise the number of days where I won’t be able to write at all by being flexible about the tools I use, but that might not be enough. A few occasions when I might not write during the next few months:
Christmas Day: I don’t know what we will do, but this is the one day of the year when I’m unlikely to be the first person to wake up. I might snatch a few minutes here and there during the day, but I don’t want to be absent from my family.
New Year’s Day: This is also Tamzin’s birthday, so I’m unlikely to find time to sit down and write anything.
Moving House: We are decorating the house in order to sell it and move early next year. I’ve done enough house moves now to know that it’s going to disrupt my writing.
Holidays: If everything goes according to plan (and it never does) then next year, after we’ve moved, we are planning to go to Disney Land in Paris. As far as writing goes, holidays are as disruptive as moving house, so I doubt I will get to do much, if anything, while I’m away.
There are probably going to be other disruptions as well, but I think it should be okay.
Like I said, I’m aiming for an average of 1,000 words a day to hit 365,000 words over the entire year. That means it doesn’t really matter if I write 2,000 words one day, and then nothing the following day, because I will still average 1,000 words on each of those days.
Although I am going to be aiming for 1,000 words every day, I’m never going to hit exactly that number. Instead, I’m expecting to go somewhere over it most days. And even if it’s only a couple of hundred words a day, that still means that every five days I will have built up my average enough that I can bank a whole day when I won’t be able to write.
As far as reporting that, my plan is to keep a tally in a spreadsheet and each daily blog post will have the current status at the bottom, like this:
Words written today:
Words written total:
Plus / Minus target:
That should show where I am overall and hopefully mean that on those days when my writing is disrupted, I don’t fall far behind and can actually enjoy my time without worrying about it.
Sep 25, 2024
As I have been preparing for my short story challenge, I have been thinking through the process of what tools I am going to use. There may be some changes here and there, but this is what I expect to start off with on Monday:
Goodnotes: I am not sure I will do any planning for these short stories, but if I feel the need, then I will do so on my iPad mini using Goodnotes 5.
Ulysses: The writing itself will be done in Ulysses, which I can access on my Mac, iPhone and iPad. That will give me the flexibility to pick up a few extra words during the day if I don’t quite meet my daily target in the morning. As well as allow me to write and publish these blog posts.
Pro-Writing Aid: Although Ulysses has built in editing tools, I paid for PWA a couple of years ago and like the process there more. Recently it has been adding more A.I. features, which I don’t use, but if they take over everything, then I may have to reconsider my options. I like it mainly for changing my regular English spelling to US English spelling.
Vellum: For formatting the eBooks themselves. This was an expensive purchase a few years ago, but I’m still getting updates and it makes what used to be a painful process very easy.
Acorn: I haven’t used this image editor much, so it is the thing most likely to change. This will be where I make book covers.
That’s about all of it, really. None of those are affiliate links, by the way.
Sep 23, 2024
It has been over three years since I last published a new story. Everything I’ve published in the last few years has either been a re-release of an existing story, or something that I had finished previously. I finished my most recent release, The Long Winter, over ten years ago.
I haven’t really stopped writing during that time and maybe a couple of things got as far as a finished first draft, but nothing went further and most things didn’t even get that far. I made plans, worked on projects, even wrote about some of them here, but nothing progressed, nothing actually got finished.
There are reasons for this. It has been an incredibly difficult few years for our family, but not finishing stories has been bugging me. I don’t like it. I don’t really feel like I’m living if I’m not writing, and as I have come to realise that I’m not finishing what I’m starting, it’s become increasingly difficult to convince myself it’s a good idea to start a story.
Which is where this challenge comes in.
Over the next year, I am going to write 52 short stories and publish them all. That’s one short story a week.
Which is a bit of an over-simplification of what I’m planning, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Effectively, what I am going to do is spend an entire year finishing stories. That is what I want to get out of this challenge; to return to being the type of person who finishes the stories I start.
The slightly longer version of the challenge is that I am basing this on the average short story being around 5,000 words long, so my daily challenge will actually be to write 1,000 words. That gives me 2,000 extra words a week for stories that require more space. There are a few other things involved as well, like editing, designing covers, formatting, etc., which I have accounted for so that I can publish an average of 5,000 words every week.
Normally I release books on all platforms, but for the sake of this challenge, I am going to be releasing on Kindle Unlimited. Later on, when I put them into collections, I will release wide, or if I change my mind during the challenge.
Another element of this challenge is accountability. That is why you are going to see a lot more blog posts from me. I am going to be writing here every day, even if it is only to let you know what my word count for the day is. Although, hopefully I can add a bit more than that!
The fiction part of the challenge kicks off next Monday (30th September). The blogging starts now as I put things in place and get ready. I’m looking forward to getting started and to finally getting over the hurdle of finishing what I start.
