Results of My Writing Vacation

Friday, July 1, 2016

Written by Kodi Wolf at 9:16 AM

My goal for June (or lack thereof) was a resounding success. Taking the pressure off and just letting myself go wherever my muse dictated worked way better than I thought it would. I had expected to barely meet my monthly minimum of 15,000 words, but I ended up almost doubling it instead.

My total word count for June was 25,538, which averages out to 851 words per day. My lowest words per day was 34 and my highest was 5,073.

Over the past few months, my word counts have mostly been for brainstorming and outlining, which is necessary work for my stories, but I think I was getting a little burned out on those activities.

For June, out of those 25,000 words, nearly 15,000 went towards actual scenes for Xena: Warrior Slave (which works out to 36 pages), and another 3,900 went to scenes for A Bondage Primer (both continuing Day 11, as well as writing scenes that will happen much later). That means about 75% of my output went to creative writing rather than planning, and that has made me feel so much better about my ability to write (weird how that doubt still creeps in sometimes).

On one day alone, I wrote 5,073 words for Warrior Slave. Granted, it took me almost 9 hours spread throughout the day to do that, but it felt amazing to have the words just flowing like that.

Even better, with all the work I did on X:WS (which includes another 2,300 words in outline notes), I'm pretty well set up to write the rest of the story (that is, when I get back to it, since I plan to take a break from it for now).

So with all that, June has been my best month yet this year.

Which leads me into my plans for July. You'd think I'd want to stick with the open-ended goal stuff, since it worked so well, but I actually don't. My takeaway isn't that I don't want or need goals. It's that I really want to write, so that's what I'm going to focus on for this month.

My goal for July is to write as much story text as I can for Lights of Life based on all the previous outlining work I've done, and only brainstorm and outline if I get stuck.

Oh, and I never really got around to getting any of my other stories into Scrivener, so I'll keep that as a backup goal for when I just can't muster the energy to be creative.

Well, I hope everyone has a great 4th of July weekend (or if you don't celebrate, just have a great weekend).