Hello and good evening,

Well…it’s evening here as I write this. I realized when I hopped over here to make the post about “Skullkeep” that I hadn’t posted a writing update lately. Not that I actually think anyone is reading this, but one never knows.

I’m doing much better this month (September) that I have in any previous month since May. In May, I was on it; I wrote 87,145 words. Most of those went to Roc and an as-yet-unannounced project. Far too few of them went to “Fires,” but I’m not going to hop on that soapbox again.

My word count in June was little better than pathetic. I wrote 21,197 of them, with several days when I didn’t write at all. Maybe I’m being a little hard on myself here, but at the end of the day, I missed a lot of days of writing.

July was a little better at 25,835 words, and August was better still with 34,421.

But September?

Well, September is going rather well, if I do say so myself. As of the end of today (16 September 2021), I have written 40,266 words (not counting this post — I never count these posts or my newsletters or anything that isn’t new fiction).

So far, I am averaging 2,516.63 words per day, but the past two days (i.e. the 15th and 16th), I wrote 5,537 words and 5,685 words respectively. In fact, what interested me enough that I wanted to share it was that I wrote for 3 hours and 30 minutes, both days. I didn’t set out to do that, and I wasn’t paying attention at all to the number of hours. I was getting ready to close out my day and just happened to notice it.

I’m still falling short of the eight hours of writing I want to achieve, but at the same time, these are good words. Fun words. So, I’m not going to get too wound up about not hitting the eight hours of writing. it’s probably a pipe dream, anyway. There are probably too many disparate demands on my time to achieve that number of writing hours at this stage of my life, come to think of it.

And you know what? That’s okay. As long as the words I write are good words–fun words–what matters most is that I write them. Not how many I write. Not how long I write.

And who judges whether they are good and fun words? Well…I do, of course. But more on that later.

I’m sitting at 262,669 words for the year, and it would be nice to see if I could double my words for the year in the final three months. I just need to average 2,859 words per day to do it.

We’ll see. At the end of the day, the important thing is to have fun writing stories.