I broke my writing streak last week. After 171 consecutive days of writing – including a five days where I held onto to streak by the skin of my teeth while on Holidays at the Adelaide Fringe Festival – it was eventually killed off on the final day of holidays by Cyclone Marcia, writing a two-day workshop, and the uncertainty of knowing whether or not we’d be able to fly home.
Of course, February was a pretty rough month for writing even before I lost my thread. February always is. I’m going to finish the month well short of the 50k I need to reach my 600k goal for the year, but I’ve planned for that, and March will be a month of catching up and getting stuff finished.
So what did 171 days of writing get me? More than I thought. Since I started tracking the writing streak, I’ve achieved the following:
- Finished Crusade (aka Flotsam #3), a novella of about 40k words in first draft.
- Finished Valiant, the first novella in a werewolf PI series, at about 32k
- Put together about 20,000 words of short fiction drafts I need to go back and finish
- Produced 10,000 words on the two novellas that will follow Valiant in my werewolf PI series.
- Produced 17,000 words on a Space Opera novella
- Produced 10,000 words of what I’m hoping will be a serialized novel in 2016
- Produced 36,000 words on an urban fantasy novel draft
Not a bad innings, really. That total is ten times the number of words I achieved in the whole of 2013 and pretty close to 1,000 words a day on average.
Today I printed off a new tracking sheet. Time to start trying to beat my record…
