In Today’s Journal
* The Novel Wrapped, and the Writing
* What Matters About Being Prolific
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
The Novel Wrapped, and the Writing
That makes 19 on the year. Woohoo!
What’s more, I’m chomping at the bit to get to 2025 and my new annual goals of 22 novels and 1,100,000 words of published fiction.
But I’m not big on sitting on my hands and waiting for a particular date to start writing. There are just too many stories out there waiting to be told.
It also helps that I wrote this particular novel in 8 writing days (9 calendar days) and the previous one in about the same short time span. So I’ll probably start my next novel today.
Counting today, there are 13 days left in December. (Yes, including Christmas, but remember, I work different hours than most people work.) So I’m pretty sure I can push myself to finish my 20th novel on or before December 31.
Of course, some of that’s a pure crapshoot. I expected my previous novel and the one before it to run longer than they did. Shrug. Shows you what I know. The story wraps when it wraps.
But if I write even most of my next novel in 2024, I’ll include it in my 2024 totals and will have hit my original goal of 20 on the year.
It wouldn’t feel fair or right to me to write all but the last day or two of that novel in 2024 and then count it as a 2025 novel.
I thought about maybe taking these last few days of 2024 to finish those two novellas I have on standby. But that feels a little like a cop-out.
Anyway, I’m jumping ahead. This one wrapped, and at the moment that’s what matters. Number 19 on the year and number 103 overall since October 2014.
What Matters About Being Prolific
Being referred to “prolific” is a feather in the writer’s cap to the degree that labels matter.
But either way, your level of output is measured by numbers. And like most things, numbers in writing is all about cause and effect.
The Cause Numbers boil down to three things:
- Physical Ability—the number of hours you can spend in the chair and the number of words you can write per hour,
- Goals—the number of words you write per day or week or month or year, and
- Work Ethic—the number of available hours you choose to prioritize putting new words on the page.
The Effect Numbers are the numbers of short stories, novellas, and/or novels (or poems or collections) written and published that cause others to label you as prolific.
But other than the fact that having more titles published directly relate to greater discoverability, the effect numbers really don’t matter. Even if you’re considered prolific.
What matters is what being prolific gives you, and I’m not talking about more sales and the money that comes in each month.
Being prolific improves your craft as a writer and makes you a better storyteller. Because being prolific gives you more practice.
No matter how often people like me say there is no such thing as perfection in art, there is the pursuit of perfection. And that journey—the pursuit and the practice you expend in that pursuit—is what really matters.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Interesting Copyright and Workshop Fun Another sale, sort of.
21 Popular Romance Tropes These are also story ideas.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 560
Writing of The Waller Files (a Stern Talbot PI mystery)
Day 1…… 2094 words. To date…… 2094
Day 2…… 4654 words. To date…… 6748
Day 3…… 3594 words. To date…… 10342
Day 4…… 3087 words. To date…… 13429
Day 5…… 3163 words. To date…… 16592
Day 6…… 3910 words. To date…… 20502
Day 7…… 3721 words. To date…… 24223
Day 8…… 4025 words. To date…… 28248 done
Fiction for December………………… 66571
Fiction for 2024………………………. 812671
Nonfiction for December…………….. 20110
Nonfiction for 2024…………………… 382680
2024 consumable words…………….. 1,195,361
Average Fiction WPD (December)…. 3698
2024 Novels to Date…………………….. 19
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 1
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 32
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..… 103
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 269
Short story collections……………………. 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.