In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Using the Challenges as a Challenge
* The Writing
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“I’ve done well for the first week of January. Made over my weekly word count and only missed one day of hitting my daily count.
“I’ve also stuck to my fiction first thing for 30 minutes goal. This keeps me coming back & I think reinforces that writing new fiction is most important.
“I was almost ready to email that I wanted in on the Stephen King challenge, but I decided to stick with my word count goals (6000/week) and focus on my publishing goals too. When I get a publishing rhythm going, I might jump in on one (or more) of those months.” KC Riggs
Using the Challenges as a Challenge
an essay spurred by an email from KC Riggs and preceded by the tiniest bit of history….
I first met my longtime friend KC Riggs, among others including Dan Baldwin et al, back in 2005 or thereabouts at the old, glorious, Society of Southwestern Authors (SSA) conference in Tucson.
Only one post-Marine Corps and writerly (and real) friendship predates that. I met Robert J. Sadler at the Craft of Writing (yes, COW) conference at the University of North Texas in Denton. I’m sure that was in the late ’90s or early 2000s.
I’ve been a very fortunate guy in meeting and making new lifelong friends. Probably the most recent is also my first reader, the inimitable F4 Phantom jet jockey, Russ Jones.
The final paragraph of the Quote of the Day is what spurred this essay.
This year—in addition to the ongoing Bradbury Challenge and the new Bradbury Challenge on Steroids—I’m offering 11 other challenges:
The Stephen King Challenge, which KC mentioned, will run in February, April, June, September, and November. For now, let’s think about February.
The goal is to write as Stephen King writes, 1000 words per day average for the month. So 28,000 words for the month. There are prizes. (But read on. There are now more.)
Here’s my new idea re using the Stephen King challenges as a challenge:
Taken as a whole, you can use the five (or four, or three, or two, depending on when you jump in) Stephen King challenges as an overall challenge to increase your average fiction words per day and/or to establish a streak that you might well carry into 2026.
If you participate in February, plan now to participate in the other SKC months too. But in each of those months, increase your personal daily word count goal by another increment.
Maybe you’ll use the 1000 average wpd for February, then increase that to 1100 or 1250 (or whatever) words per day for April, then 1200 or 1500 (or whatever) wpd for June, and so on.
That would be a great way to ease into shifting your priorities. More importantly, it would be a great way to signal to your characters how important recording their stories is to you.
The Run With Harvey Challenge
We’re also doing the Run With Harvey Challenge in January, March, May, July, and August. If you want to, you can even do it in December. Again, no matter when you do it, there are prizes.
For that one, as a nod to what I hope will be the best year ever for all of us, I backed-off the daily goal a little to writing 2025 words per day.
So despite the title of this goal, you don’t have to focus on trying to keep up with me. You only have to focus, rightly, on keeping up with yourself.
Taken as a whole, you can also use these five (or four, or three, or two, depending on when you jump in) Run With Harvey challenges as an overall challenge to increase your average fiction words per day and/or to establish a streak that you might well carry into 2026.
The “secret” to doing any of the above—
or to actually enjoy doing it—is to keep the writing an enjoyable, fun escape from the rest of your day-to-day life.
The best and easiest way to make writing fun is to remember this:
- WHAT you write—the individual short story or novella or novel—matters only as a few minutes’ or hours’ entertainment, first for you and then for your readers. What you write is no more important than that.
- What’s truly important, if you’re a fiction writer, is THAT you write.
That’s why I always emphasize setting a goal to write a particular number of publishable words of fiction per day. Whether those words go into a short story, a novella, or a novel doesn’t matter.
Again, what matters is THAT you write. That you set the goal at whatever number and then strive to reach it. This is the best way to shove “my story is ‘important’ right out of your mind.
When as a young child I asked my paternal grandfather why he was putting gas in his old blue ’52 Chevy pickup when the tank was already a little over half full, he said, “If I keep the top half full, the bottom half’ll take care of itself.”
The same holds true for writing fiction.
I often see or hear writers talking about “taking time off to refill the well.”
Sorry, but that’s just another bullsh*t myth. Your “well” doesn’t matter. Your characters’ well is already full, and it will remain so as long as you continue to exercise it.
If you make THAT you write important and don’t fret over where the words end up, your tank will never run dry. And I personally believe your writerly mileage will improve considerably without you even noticing it.
A New Prize for the Stephen King Challenge
I have several nonfiction books by other writers on various aspects of writing that I’ve bought over the years. Other than maybe looking at the table of contents, I’ve never even cracked many of them.
I’ve decided, rather than letting those books languish on my bookshelves to continue collecting dust, I’ll begin giving them away as a new prize added to the current prizes for the Stephen King Challenge.
I’ll compile a list of those books and publish it in a future issue of TNDJ later this month, probably when I “formally” announce the Stephen King Challenge for February.
Then if you enroll in the Challenge and complete it successfully, you will be able to choose any one of those books as a prize. I’ll even pay the shipping cost.
And sure, I’ll kick in your choice of one of those books for completing the Run With Harvey Challenge too (as long as they hold out).
The Writing
I had a truly banner day of writing yesterday with 7162 words. I’d written only about 500 words or so on the novel, but a short story kept begging to be written.
Finally I gave in, opened a new document, and wrote “A Sure Thing” (Exotic Fantasy). It rushed out in just under 3 hours at roughly 1590 words per hour.
I love it when that happens. Another half-hour of cycling, and the story was finished. Then I took a break for lunch and went back to add another couple thousand words to the novel.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Big Brother wants to peer inside your brain Story ideas.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 1190
Writing of “A Sure Thing” (Exotic Fantasy)
Day 1…… 4771 words. To date…… 4771 done
Writing of Blackwell Ops 34: Solomon Payne
Day 1…… 2005 words. To date…… 2005
Day 2…… 2992 words. To date…… 4997
Day 3…… 3998 words. To date…… 8995
Day 4…… 4591 words. To date…… 13586
Day 5…… 4503 words. To date…… 18089
Day 6…… 4499 words. To date…… 22588
Day 7…… 2391 words. To date…… 24979
Fiction for January…………………… 29750
Fiction for 2025………………………. 29750
Nonfiction for January……………….. 8140
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 8140
2025 consumable words…………….. 37890
Average Fiction WPD (January)……. 4250
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 0
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 1
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)……………. 104
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 271
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.