100,000 words is a lot of words

What a hi-larious pun

Despite being really, really sick all day (I slept most of the day, and the times when I was awake were spent blowing my nose, hacking, wishing I was dead, or all of the above) I actually managed to do a lot of planning for the next part of The Ashen Destroyer (which happens when you spend most of the day rotating between lying on the couch, lying on the loveseat, lying on the recliner, and then repeating the cycle). So when I sat down to write tonight, I was going to just burn out my minimum of 500 and call it good, but instead I really got into the story (I think that hitting around 2,000 is my breaking point; after that it's really easy to just keep going) and churned out only a couple words shy of 5,000. Which is impressive in its own right (though it doesn't beat Death's Aria's 7200 words on January 28, or Where Gods and Mortal's Dance killer book-finishing blitz of doom that was around 15,000 words in a day), but what I feel is more important is the landmark goal it surpassed.

I made a goal at the beginning of the year to write every day, no matter what, in 2012. Even in this month and a half since then, it hasn't been easy. I've often been really busy, gone to cons, gotten sick, had other plans (I also will write one game review a day minimum, which takes time as well), and more, but I kept at it. I haven't missed a day yet, and my current daily average is ~2,100 words for the year.

The point of this is that, as of tonight, I have written a total of 100,000 new words in 2012. This is not counting any words on my game reviews blog, which I'd bet would add at least 10-20k to that number (I should total those up sometime, just for fun). This also doesn't count any editing that wasn't complete rewriting (aka, I counted rewriting/merging three chapters in Death's Aria, but didn't count the paragraph by paragraph changes I made when editing the rest of it). So yeah, in 47 days I wrote 100,000 words. Not too shabby.

Of course this is only the start. According to my brilliant math skills, if I keep up at this pace I'll churn out ~ 780,000 words in 2012. This beats my 2011 estimate of between 500,000 and 600,000 words (depending on how much of the Steelgods edit I count) which means I'm improving so we'll take it (assuming I can keep this up). My writing word count hasn't been as consistant this year as it was last year, with last year me running about 2000 words a day every day, while now it usually goes from between 1000-1500 every day followed by a massive spike of 5000-6000. So we'll see if I can smooth that out a little (aka write 5000 words every day! Yeah, that isn't going to happen unless I quit my job).

Since this is already a self indulgent post, I'm going to toot my own horn just a little more: initial alpha readers of Death's Aria are starting to give back feedback, and the consensus has been very positive. Granted, none of them are in my current writing group, who I'm certain will tear the whole thing to shreds, but having people say it's their favorite out of all my books is encouraging. As I said before, I wrote it after listening to the pigeon-holed Writing Excuses podcast in an attempt to mix up genres a little, and I ended up liking it a lot more than I expected. Current goal is to get feedback sometime early March, run some hard edits in March (while writing A Straight Cut) and then submit it in April. Hopefully that works as planned.

That's it from me, fellas. Thanks for tolerating me talking about myself for a whole blog post. :D