Targets and Milestones

Back at the start of December, my previous post detailed my desire to write the equivalent of 1,000 words a day during a year. Hidden in that post was the fact that I was approaching a million words written in total across all my different books, both factual and fiction. Indeed, 948,000 words according to the count in Microsoft Word.

I'd also suggested that I might get somewhere around 250,000 for the 2025 year at the end. Those few quiet days spent here in the flat over the festive period actually managed to lift this total up to 272,000. This is a total that I was actually delighted with, all things considered.

I'm also very pleased with the fact that I've managed to complete the entirety of The Leopard Watches in basically three months. Well, the file timestamp tells me it was created on 24th of September, so around 100 days from start to finish. I'm really not trying to race through anything, but it shows I was consistently doing 700-800 words for the period.

Even more interesting is that I've kept going. Actually, I've accelerated. Emerald of the East was created on the 3rd of January. That's 18,650 words in just eleven days. Keep that up for a year and I'll do half-a-million!

And the point of all this? Well, there are actually two points that I want to mention.

Firstly, apparently, targets do keep me motivated. I made a post about needing to be more active with my writing and this seems to have allowed me to get right back into it.

Secondly, my "lifetime" total has clicked over the 1,000,000 words written mark. It's a personal milestone, to be sure, but I'm still glad that I've done it.

Unattainable Targets - Pushing On

I've always felt that I work better when I have a target or goal to work towards. I'm pretty sure this is the case for many people. We need some form of motivation to get anything meaningful done. This is definitely the case when it comes to my writing. However much I might have a desire to tell another story, I most-often simply don't have any motivation to just get on with it.

So, when I reached that point, in 2023, where I was getting tired of writing my books about my journeys to Africa and the whole premise of writing non-fiction purely for my own pleasure, I took an early decision to set a target for myself. I'd no idea at the time whether it was a reasonable target or not, but it was something that seemed like a good idea.

So, that target was to write 1,000 words a day. Not exactly 1,000 words every day, not even some words every day, but a target that I could keep in mind and check as I went along. Let's think of it more as a goal of 360,000 words a year - a third of a million in round numbers.

Well, as you can see from this spreadsheet, I'm not exactly smashing it. Still, for a couple of years it has kept me in that 300,000 word per year zone that I'm really pleased with.

As for 2025? Not so much.

This year has been difficult. Losing Dad was harder than it appeared. There's been the total upheaval of moving house and a bit more stress about it than I may have hitherto admitted.  Then there was our Trip to India. It was worth the effort to get those tiger photos that I have wanted for so many years, but I found it very difficult and exhausting. I did write most of 51 Frames during the trip, but didn't find the time or the inclination to write much of anything else, causing me to fall behind on my novels at the time.

Even so, Star of the North and Another Star were both finally completed this year and I'm working on that next one with a reasonable amount of commitment. Having concentrated on two sequels, it is nice to be writing a completely stand-alone story that allows a change of focus.

With just a month to go until the end of the year, I know that I'm not going to make it to anywhere near 300,000 words. - I'll do well to get above 250,000 I think. Still, I can use that total figure at the bottom to push on and try and make it to 1,000,000 words in total, can't I?

All the titles shown above are available online in one form or several. Most are available in serialised formats on tapas.io and most in hardback, paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon.