My Million Word Year - 2013.

 

This blog is about my attempt to challenge or even define my writing productivity. My aim is to write an average of 2740 words per day, for the entire year, and thereby produce 1,000,000 words in 2013.

Other people have attempted such a feat before, and many have succeeded, and it is my intention to succeed at it myself. However, there is, of course, no guarantee.

Each day, or at least every other day, I will post my progress, and talk about the issues I’ve encountered in my writing, or the things that have affected my writing, or lack thereof.

Just to be precise on this point, this blog will NOT count toward my word count. The only thing that will count is genuine writing on either newsletters and reviews, or works I’m planning to get published one day.

1,000,000 words sounds a lot, but that’s only 100 10,000 word short stories, or 200 5,000 word ones. It’s 10 long 100,000 word novels, or 20 short 50,000 word ones. It’s 25-40 novellas or any mix of the above. I don’t write enough reviews to write 2,000 500 word reviews so there won’t be many of those.

I don’t intend to bore the pants off you with the details of my various works in progress, nor my various writing personas – I have five pen names that will be involved here, nor do I expect every word I write to be published. I hope they will all, after editing transmogrify into published work, but these will, this year be first draft pieces, and you know what editors are like with the red pen! When I looked through my live directory on my writing PC I realised I had almost 20 stalled work in progresses, ranging from sci-fi to romance to speculative to historical to alternative history. To finish them I would need to write around 700,000 words, and most of them had at some time or other been promised to somebody for this year. Then a writing contact of mine mentioned the magic number – 2740 – the number of words to write a day in order to hit a million in a year.

Please come along for the ride, and enjoy my experience, or commiserate with me in my misery, one or the other, I hope, it’ll be a real ride.

PS I’m not giving odds on achieving it or not, the odds would be quite long I suspect, but I intend to give it a “bloody good go”.