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Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about the stuff around my writing and not so much about my writing itself. I think at 14 weeks, it’s about time I give another update on each project and the whole #onemillionwords 2021 thing as a whole.

Overall, the whole challenge has been a great experience. I’m sitting at just over 120k words which, unfortunately, is about 90k short of where I need to be right now.

A few of my projects have almost completely come to a grinding halt. The reason other than general writer’s block is because I need to take some time to write up some proper outlines and figure out some plots, especially for my Keeper Chronicle series which is a series of short stories, novellas, and the like. The other is my book CLOAKED RITES. I thought this one would be easy since I’ve rewritten it at least three times before this year but now, I think that is exactly my problem. I’ve rewritten it so many times that I’m unsure how I want it all to fold out. I have so many options in front of me from past drafts but none of them are fitting right.

Another project that I haven’t been keeping up with is this very blog. I am behind on the weekly updates but have been working on catching up and hopefully will soon. Every week is half or a quarter written and they just need to be finished off, edited, and reorganized. I have a habit of writing posts out of order in a sort of stream of consciousness and then have to reorder it later on so others even have a hope of following along. The same goes for a handful of book reviews.

Dangerous Lies of a Perpetually Single Werewolf, or DLPSW for short, has been a bit of a yo-yo. Sometimes I can bang out 2-3 thousand works on this story in one sitting and other times I struggled to add 100 words. I knew this one might be a little difficult going into it since romance isn’t my normal genre but I love the story, concept, and characters. Besides, experimenting with other genres is never a bad idea. Good romance is really hard to write and I am always in awe at the numerous authors that pull it off book after book after book.

From there we have my two mostly golden children, so to speak. CHAINED HEAVENS and The Stormbloods Saga, TSS, have overall been easy writes. Neither are where they are supposed to be word count wise but they are the closest to their goals. CHAINED HEAVENS is about 30k away from the daily goal of about 100k as of this week and TSS is about 3k away. Like any project, they have their ups and downs but so far, all the downs have been easily overcome through random D&D quest prompts and/or talking things out with my husband. Both have been extremely effective.

We’re about 3 and a half months in and I am starting to see a few things I need to do differently for 2022. Going into this challenge, I didn’t give it much thought and planning past the whole buy bullet journal and copy example given. Well, for one that bullet journal hasn’t been updated at all this month but I hope to find some time to change that. It has been my best attempt at using an agenda-type thing thus far in my life and I’d like to keep trying. I am sort of happy my husband talked me out of the 24 ultra-fine colored pens made specifically for bullet journals that were about $50. They would just be collecting dust right now.

Along the same lines of the bullet journal, I haven’t been the best at updating my NaNoWriMo projects which have resulted in a few times of playing catch up with the updates. I’m doing better about it than I would have thought so it’s a tool I want to keep using. I just have to get better at using it. My goal going forward is to set weekly check-ins on all my projects. Whether that means my writing projects for this challenge or future projects and anthologies for VeL or even house chores that need to be done. This will be a scheduled time to actually sit and go through my list. It’s part giving myself a sort of pat on the back for being productive and part making sure I don’t forget about what still needs to be done. Getting on a self-imposed schedule is always hard, especially for those of us with ADHD, but it’s the only thing that works. That is when it works. I just have to keep trying until it works.

One thing I know I will be doing differently in 2022 is not working on six different projects at once. It would have been a better idea if I had split everything up even more and set out to work on only two, maybe three projects at once. The blog posts are a year-round thing but I would have changed out the other project(s) to give myself a break. Think of it as rotating fields. I’ve been trying to super grow from all fields and sucking the nutrients out of the soil. Next year I plan on doing a rotation to keep the nutrients intact. Hopefully, that metaphor made sense to anyone else.

I knew going into these six projects was a lot but in all my years, I’ve never learned from the downfalls of ‘going big or going home.’ My common mode of operation is running full steam until the crash and burn. I’ve learned more over the years on how to pick up and keep going after. It’s been far easier to learn than the alternative but maybe one day I’ll learn not to go full force 200% of the time. I don’t expect it to be next year though. Maybe 2023. Maybe.

To sum it up, my word count might not be where it should be for this challenge. I do spend some days only writing the minimum amount needed to keep my streak going in 4thewords. Some days, I do nothing because I have so many projects on my plate right now that I freeze with indecision. Been watching a lot of ghost-hunting YouTube videos lately because of that. These are all things I have time to work on. In this challenge, the year isn’t even halfway finished. There is still a chance. With organizing my work? Every time I build my structure and schedule there’s an even greater chance of it all staying around for longer than a day or two.

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Getting large amounts of writing done for me has only ever happened under specific situations; a fast-approaching deadline with last-minute panic and monster energies the only thing fueling me or a random way of inspiration that disappears for months after.

Like many writers out there, I promised myself I would write more and dedicate more time overall to my various projects in 2021. My original goal was to try to get about 100,000 words to page, almost three times what I was able to get out in 2020. I wasn’t 100% upset with my word count last year. 2020 was the dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires. 2021, please don’t make me eat my words.*

It made sense my word count suffered. That made it even more important that I strive to do better this year. I thought 100,000 was a good high, but a reasonable number to aim for. Then I saw a tweet from a Twitter mutual; they were aiming for 1 million words in 2021. Well, to be clear, they started #onemillionwords with the goal to write as much as a person can with the pipedream goal of 1 million. I signed up to participate so fast that a minute after my tweet reply was sent I stopped and asked myself just how out of my mind I really was. I wrote maybe 40k all last year and that included NaNoWriMo which I did not do well in. To be fair to me, I had gotten married at the end of October and was burnt out from having to re-plan the whole event four times because of COVID cases rising in my home state. November was more of a ‘recharge’ month than a month of productivity.

Nevertheless, I was recharged when they tweeted about it, maybe not fully but as recharged as one could get in a pandemic. Why shouldn’t I attempt this? I had nothing to lose but sanity and that wasn’t a big concern of mine. Again, we were all stuck in a pandemic. I had nothing to lose and a whole lot of finished projects to gain.

So, I got a bullet journal and copied, line for line, the examples my mutual posted on Twitter. I have ADHD, diagnosed young and all that because it’s genetic in my family coming from my dad, and I have never gotten the hang of agendas much to the chagrin of all my teachers but bullet journals always looked so cool. They were always so well laid out and made perfect sense to me but I could never find one EXACTLY like what I’d needed. School agendas were useless to me and I often ended up ‘accidentally’ losing them within the first month of school. My parents were very well aware that I did this so thankfully never bought me a nice and fancy one. I got the cheap, basic ones that every public school kid got in my town. My brain was too scattered to come up with a layout that was both useful and aesthetically pleasing.

All that aside I now have the perfect example before me. Their journal pages were set up for the same thing I wanted it for. It was exactly what I needed.

I haven’t fully laid my bullet journal yet but I’ve been having a lot of fun with what I’ve done so far, going slow to make sure it’s just how I want it. I’ve been taking my time for two reasons; my handwriting is horrible scribble when I go at anything but a snail’s pace and I’m putting thought into the organization I want. I’m learning! Evening putting in the effort I have so far has been leagues better than I had ever been able to do in the past.

Long story short, before I go on another small tangent, this whole event of sorts has been wild. One million words broken down to 365 days is approximately 2740 words a day and 82.5k words a month. 2740 every single day. That means holidays, weekends, sick days, and days I just want to do nothing but play video games which sadly, I haven’t done a whole lot of lately. I miss you Hades

Hades aside, after starting #onemillionwords, I realized it’s unreal how many work in process projects I have in my files. All half-finished and all ones I still want to finish. If nothing else, I’ve always been great at producing ideas by the dozens. My ability to plan out and execute though is mighty shoddy.

For my one million words, I decided to break it down into six different projects because it seems, I’m still that overachieving, overeager child that goes hard and will probably burn out just as hard. But if I burn out at the end of February then I’ll have about 165k words written at the best and 20k at the worst. 20k words are better than nothing and still something I’ll be very proud of.

At the time of writing this post, I am at 22341 words. Not bad so far if I say so myself.
My projects range from blog posts to a werewolf romance novel with a heavy dose of the fake/pretend relationship trope and everything in between. I even have working titles for each one which is more than I usually do. I’m horrible at titles and usually tap a friend to do it for me.

My projects are as followed:

  • CHAINED HEAVENS – A high fantasy short story collection telling the story of a woman who has trained her whole life to rid the world of evil creatures with her two siblings. It all goes wrong when an ancient demon god starts setting their sights on her to help them lay waste to the mortal world
  • Blog posts for Vox et Liber. As you can see, I’ve already been doing fairly good with that one. They’ll be anything from game/book reviews to weekly updates on my progress this year. So stick around to check those out.
  • CLOAKED RITES – An urban fantasy with a mix of alternate history and steampunk set in the mid-1800s. The main character is the lead homicide agent at the London office of supernatural affairs. In her year of being lead, it’s been rather boring until a serial killing cult starts going through the supernatural population of London with terrifying speed and may soon be setting their sights on her. The main character in this one is very fun to write since she’s always so done with everyone around her 24/7
  • The Stormblood Saga Series – The first 3 novellas in an episodic urban fantasy series set in present-day Nowheresville, Massachusetts. This one has Fae and a half-blood who’d rather work at her little indie bookshop than deal with her Fae side of the family but where would the fun be in that?
  • The Dangerous Lies of a Perpetually Single Werewolf – The aforenoted fake/pretend relationship werewolf romance novel. Two best friends, one werewolf and one human, have to fake date to keep wolf boy out of getting set up with a mate against his will.
  • The Keeper Chronicle Series – The main character inherits a house after her great uncle is killed that is sort of alive and definitely magical. Within it’s walls, it keeps both the refugees and war criminals of a war between Heaven and Hell contained. She feeds the house and in turn the house keeps everyone safe, especially from murderous angels which means she can never leave.

These projects range in age from being started in 2014 to this past summer. My main goal this year is to start clearing out the projects that have been clogging up my mental queue for years. I’m confident that I can do just that with #onemillionwords. It might not be all six but it’ll be a good chunk regardless.

For any writers out there that want to join and are on Twitter use the hashtag #onemillionwords. Or follow the creator, @Cknightwrites. They were the one to start it and this lazy bum of a writer will be forever thankful that they put this event into motion. Let’s hope it becomes as annual as NaNoWriMo.

*It made me eat my words. Please note, this was mostly written before terrorists tried to take control of the Capitol building in D.C. I, like many people, have doomscrolled for hours the last few days. My writing goals are still the same with a little more attention to self-care and mental health. I hope for all participating, you’ll make sure to add in more of each when needed.