I’ve been tracking my writing stats since 2024, and in the past two years, January was a light month. Not so this year. As of this writing, my word count is 33,039 for the month — and note that it’s not quite over yet. Unlike December, this time, my writing pace was steady, which means this word count figure is actually a bit of a slowdown.
But I don’t think that slowdown is a bad thing, given that burnout is real. And toward the end of the month, I was feeling it a little anyway. This last week, I’ve intentionally backed off a little…but only a little, and only enough to tune and calibrate a bit. The idea is to write at a sustainable pace for the entire twelve months. That’s why, despite the extremely strong month, I’ve decided not to change my original annual goal of 225,000 words.
- About half my writing output was on All That Mattered, and that’s moving along at enough of a clip that I felt comfortable with a soft announcement of its posting date: March 29th. As of right now, I’m still on track for that. I find that it’s easiest to write it one scene at a time, which feels slow sometimes but has added up over the month.
- Another quarter of it was related to blog posts. One of my other goals for 2026, besides consistency, is to establish the beginnings of a backlog. That includes the professional-field writing that I do under my real name, alongside the non-fiction writing I do in this blog. At the moment, I have a calendar set up and I’m mostly sticking to it. I’ve developed a rhythm where I often write posts on Saturdays to be posted the following Wednesday or Saturday.
- The rest of it involved a fair bit of pre-writing and “thinking on paper,” which is also a good thing. In addition, I took the time to take down my two Scarecrow and Mrs. King “ongoing series” and started publishing them as one-shots:
- Crossed Lines
- Landing the Encore (which actually had not been previously published, although I wrote the first draft in late 2023)
- Seeing Clearly
- Stay With Me
- This Same Old Game
- Unspoken Plans
In all six cases, the reposts happened after rewrites, so those figures counted toward the monthly total. In addition, these six items were the only ones I’d written, so if I add to the list in February, it won’t be quite as extensively.
- Finally, I ended up spending MLK Weekend completely revamping the structure of all of my web sites (including this one). That wasn’t writing, but it did take time.
The bottom line is that, overall, my month was both solid and productive — and, even better, my daily statistics show that it was consistent. Out of the 31 days in January, I have written on 24 of them. That’s a big increase from my usual average of 13. As of right now, while I’m still tracking goals in terms of word count, I’ve also set a secondary goal of pushing my average up to 18 over the course of this year.
And if I can maintain that, I’ll easily meet the other goals I’ve set.