It's time for another bit of writing about my bits of writing.
I've talked a lot about my penchant for recording how many words I write per day/month/year. It's a way for me to see if I'm really doing anything in my chosen craft, and it has been really helpful in showing me where I focus. In fact, one of the reasons that I have fewer posts on this website is because I saw that I was spending a huge amount of my writing time focusing on my non-fiction and I wanted to change that. Today, I started looking at my word count for the year. It isn't where I want it to be: At the end of April, I had written about 150,000 words. These were split between my book about Metal Gear Solid, worldbuilding the place where my TTRPG is set, rules for my TTRPG, and picking at a bizarre retelling/remake of the Little Red Riding Hood story. There are other, miscellaneous additions, but that makes up the bulk of it. The thing that stood out to me, though, was how April 2021 compares to other Aprils. In other words, where do I stand as far as my word count after four months during the past four years? It breaks down like this:
Clearly, I'm doing about as well as I was at the same point during our first month of quarantine. Considering how much has happened to me and my family in the past half year, I think it makes sense that I'm still writing as if the world is on fire. Because it is. So, I'm not publicly flogging myself for having not written more in 2020. I was spending my school days in front of the computer, draining myself into cyberspace. Writing did not come easily then. By the time I became accustomed to the oddness of my school year, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I even tried to do NaNoWriMo…then I contracted COVID. (I also got three or four rejections on my submissions for War Golem, if we're really adding to the pile, here.) In other words, I wasn't in a particularly creative headspace for a good portion of last year. And it doesn't really surprise me to see that 2021 is following suit. No, what really surprised me the most was the next bit of information that I gleaned. On my spreadsheet, I have a tally of all of my completed novella-length or longer projects. Because I've been doing NaNoWriMo since 2015, I've been finishing a couple of books a year pretty consistently. I mean, I even finished two novellas in 2020, despite everything else that was going on. But when I looked back at 2019--which was not my most productive year--I was surprised to see that it was 2019 where I finished the highest number of projects. How many? Seven. Seven books, totaling almost 300,000 words. Three were part of my novella-world project. Another was finishing up a NaNoWriMo from 2018 that I hadn't completed during the month. The next was a short story that morphed into a novella, one that I had been working on occasionally for a year or so. Novellas aside, I had two novels that I finished, both of them Shakespeare-adjacent: One was my Da Vinci Code but with Shakespeare book, Raleigh House. The other was my NaNoWriMo for 2019, Elsinore Ranch, which is a retelling of Hamlet. It makes me wonder what I did in 2019 that I've clearly forgotten how to do in the two years since. I know that a big portion of it is that my video game obsessions aren't easing up. For some reason, indulging my addictions doesn't satiate them. And I know that my life will not be "normal" again anytime soon--perhaps ever. It's hard to say. Will I ever get back to that level of prolificacy? Will I ever be so excited about my stories that I'd rather write them more than anything else? I mean, it isn't that I wasn't writing at all. It was just that nothing really sang to me. And I know that writers have to write, regardless of if their muse is crooning inspiration to them or not. But I'm not a professional writer. I don't know if I ever will be. I don't have a contract or a deadline to meet. I don't have to hit a quota. Yet I'm not happy that my numbers are trending downwards. I want to improve my output, my editing, my craft. I don't want 2019 to be my bumper crop for finished projects. So I guess I gotta figure out how to get what I'm after, huh? Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|