Jamie's Writing Update for March 2014

Earlier this year, I talked a little about my goal to write 2,014 words a day, every day this year. The quest continues, and I did stick with it for yet another month. Some other cool and interesting things happened as well...

Quarter Million Words

Yes, I passed that milestone a few days ago. I've written more than a quarter of a million words so far this year... and then I talked briefly about another milestone that I was close to: Writing more words of new fiction in three months than in my previous 36 years on this planet.

Thanks to a last-minute writing binge--producing nearly 8,000 words a day--I hit that goal too. Since this year started, I've written 273,792 words -- exactly 23 words more than I had written before 2014 started.

In just three months, I've doubled my life's word count.

Mental exhaustion is starting to set in, but I don't want to stop. I'm beginning to think a much smaller daily writing goal would be less pressure and more sustainable. But in the meantime, I'm finally getting to write some things that I've been thinking about for years, so I'll keep at it as long as I can.

How Much Did I Write?

Another 88,686 words, which brings my total so far this year to 273,792 words

What did I write?

My story for the third volume of the Terran Shift Anthology finally ended in early March at almost 30,000 words. For a first draft from me, that's practically a novel.

Then I wrote two really short stories, one based on Jules Trionis from my novel Pariah, and the other about a goblin clan losing their sacred idol in my fantasy world. I'm not entirely convinced the former is plausible, but it's an interesting story anyway... the latter ended up being a lot funnier than I intended, but then I did still have Dappil on my mind, so I bet he had a hand in twisting that tale.

Following that, I turned an offhand comment from Paul about creating a new black market selling memories from people encoded in the Soul Bank into an 18,000 word novella.

About halfway through March, I finally got to start the Chronicles of Palamar, which will eventually be a 9-book fantasy epic set in a fantasy world I've been designing since I was in elementary school. My initial design of this series called for nine 30-50k novellas, with the intention of compiling them into three printed volumes as well as having a series of ebooks. I wrote the prologue and the first two books, and each book is already pushing 30k words, so I'm starting to wonder if it will be even longer than I anticipated. I'll start book 3 today. It's nice to finally be able to write these stories; I've had notes and scenes sitting around for years.