The final volume of my Cole & Srexx series, The Fires of Aurelius, went live today. I finished it back around June 24th, and I have since struggled with my writing being fun.

In the wake of completing Fires, I nibbled around the edges of my next major project, The Fall of Skullkeep, wrote a thousand words (plus or minus) to start a story I’ve wanted to write for a while, and put another chapter into a story I’m still trying to understand. All that writing added up to 7,873 words…which was only 37.14% of my monthly total.

That’s right.

During June, I only wrote 21,197 words. I wanted to write more words in the last six days of the month than I wrote the entire rest of the month, but I didn’t achieve that. I came kinda close…just a hair less than 60%. But as I like to paraphrase an old saying (which I’m absolutely certain is very much not in vogue these days), ‘close’ only counts in horseshoes and high explosives.

Oh, no…I mentioned ‘high explosives!’ I must be some weirdo militia nutbar with eighty-seven bunkers and more ammunition than my local National Guard…right?

Ha! Moving on…

My goal for the last six months of 2021 is to write 1.5 million words of new fiction, and I did not establish a proper beachhead on that goal right away. I’ve only just today–6 July 2021–sat down at my computer to write.

The good news is that I completed 2,968 words. It was only one chapter, and it was on a story that I won’t publish right away. It’s starting a new series, you see. It’s an Urban Fantasy and one of three (so far) in a shared world, meaning that all three series happen in the same world. I think I shared the series titles with my newsletter subscribers, but I’m not sure.

And yes, it’s a high-magic world. If I ever wrote a Fantasy story that wasn’t a high-magic world, my close friends and family would insist on me going to the doctor…because something would obviously be wrong with me.

This is my first in what I hope to be a chronicle of my efforts to achieve 1.5 million words of new fiction.

Daily Word Count: 2,968

Monthly Word Count: 2,968

Total Words for 2021: 165,115