[Updated 2024-03-31 for March metrics, 2024-04-30 for April metrics]

There’s a bit of clickbait to that title, but according to a quick web search, the first Harry Potter book (Sorcerer’s Stone) has just short of 77,000 words. And in my writing journey for 2024, as of January 25, I had written that many words.

Don’t get too excited.

I don’t expect it to be as coherent or commercially successful as J.K. Rowling’s works, and there probably won’t be a movie made of any of the first things I’ve composed this year.

But it’s an enormous start to the year, and if I stay on pace, there’s a reasonable chance of passing one million words in 2024. (The entire Harry Potter series, seven books, is 1,084,170 words, or 90,347 words a month).

Last year I wrote about writing a thousand Amazon reviews in one year. In the last 18 months I’ve made it to 1145, but I didn’t get a thousand-review year. I’m okay with that, and if I only get half a million words this year, it’s more than I’ve written in any decade, including college probably, so I’ll be satisfied.

A novel in a month

Some of you may have met me through National Novel Writing Month[1], or NaNoWriMo. I got involved in 2002, completing a 50,000 word novel the same month I got laid off from 3PAR and lost my mother in the same week. The writing, and the community, probably came the closest to keeping me sane through a very stressful month.

I continued doing it every year through 2009, including being the San Francisco Municipal Liaison a couple of years and helping my friend Linda start the peninsula region along the way. I stayed as active as I could with the South Bay group, but in 2009, life and a bad relationship soured me on the effort. When you need an escape from your escape, it’s not a good thing. I’ve occasionally considered going back, but I haven’t.

Getting back on the writing horse

I’ve written partial drafts of at least half a dozen short stories since then, and from November 2022 to March 2023 I kept a handwritten journal every day. Double espresso and sparkling water, a warm white monitor lamp, and a notebook and pen started every day in that time. Some days I literally wrote “I don’t feel like writing anything today” and others I wrote a full page.

But 10 to a hundred or so words is pretty manageable, undirected other than the obligation to write *something* every day, and didn’t run the risk of turning into anything interesting.

To be honest, the NaNoWriMo days weren’t as smooth as they might have seemed. Just needing 1667 words a day on average isn’t so scary in theory. But thinking back, that felt harder than this January effort where I averaged 3290 words a day.

One counter-intuitive reason is that I didn’t have, want, or really need anyone to support me in Home Office Writing Alone Month (HoOfWrAlMo? Maybe not). I didn’t go to write-ins, or share my word count with anyone consistently. There was no party at Rickshaw Stop when I got to the end of the month, just dinner at Opa with my honey. And that was just celebrating Wednesday, and her not wanting to cook.

The stronger reason, I think, is that I wasn’t focused on trying to get a single coherent work to the finish line. In fact, with 11 new projects and one I picked up after two years of sitting in the drafts folder, I didn’t have to stick with one character, one story line, even one location. So if I ran out of steam on one thing, I could warm up something else.

As with my 2000s era novels, my characters sometimes take off in different directions. The runaway one MC picks up at a rest area who I thought would go camping with him? Her dad’s a real estate magnate who invites him to join the family business, not just the family. The girl another MC meets at a coffee shop on the coast? She’s taller than last time he saw her. And there’s more, but I’m going to be intentionally vague for now.

Sometimes the draw for a character or a story ebbs and flows. Sometimes I don’t care enough to come up with a full length story/novella, much less a novel, and sometimes a one-off suddenly pops into existence as a five-book series that I’m writing out of order and then going back to try to squeeze some continuity into it. Witches, spells, and brooms? I lived through that in the early 90s so maybe some of that will end up in a story called Allan Kahzam and the Bikini of Extreme Peril before the snow falls at Squaw Valley next winter.

Darn, it’s bad enough that a KLF video gave me an idea for a story. Now I have to figure out a magical bikini?

But you see where this is going.

The wrap for January 2024

I wrote on December 31, and seem to have two days in January where I either didn’t update my spreadsheet, or didn’t write. I don’t remember that happening, but we’ll just go with 32 days to report for January.

Total words: 103,414 (3232/day average)
Pace for the year: 1,179,565 words
Total works opened in Word: 12 (one started December 31, one started January 31)

And since I left this in my drafts folder for a month, let’s do…

The wrap for February 2024

Total words in February: 40,321 (1390/day average)
Total words in 2024: 143,735 (2396/day average for 60 days)
Pace for the year: 860,053 words
Total works opened in Word: 22 (including five archival works and one that will get rolled into another)

Another month has passed, so here is the obvious…

Wrap for March 2024

Total words in March: 35,760 (1153/day average)
Total words in 2024: 179,495 (1951/day average)
Pace for the year: 712,126 words
Total works opened in Word: 17 (11 current, 5 archival, and one still waiting to roll into another)

And another month. You know the drill.

Wrap for April 2024

Total words in April: 42,578 (1419/day average)
Total words in 2024: 222,073 (1820/day average)
Pace for the year: 664,398
Total works opened in Word and Reedsy: 28 (11 current, 1 rolled into another as foretold, 11 closed, 5 archival)

Where do we go from here?

Well, if you spend a month working on a single story line, you may make it to the end of the month with nothing salvageable but the patterns and habits you developed. That, and being the legend of the guy who finished and submitted his first novel with seven (7) seconds to spare, are what I still carry from NaNoWrimo between 2002-2009.

But if you track multiple projects, you may find it easier to write, and out of those 12 projects I added anywhere from 854 to 23125 words to last month, maybe two or three will see the light of day before the Summer Solstice. One of them is looking to be that five-book series, two of them have a third part still to be started, there are half a dozen I haven’t resurrected from the last 20 years, plus digging out and looking at those 8 novel-attempts to see if any of them hold up to a decade or more in cold storage on a VM in San Diego.

And it feels like every time I walk to a cafeteria on campus at work, I get another picture in my head that could become a thing. Like that five-book series that began with the thought of a couple of young women sitting around a large living room asking themselves why guys like boobs. Don’t feel too bad for the guy in the room. He has a pretty good answer. Maybe you’ll get to read it later this year.

I would offer to write a future post about my writing tools and workflow[2], but “Word + OneDrive” isn’t so exciting. So there you have that.

For my fellow NaNoWrimo survivors, and any other writers out there, how is your productivity going? What do you think is worth thinking about as someone gets back into writing, or into it in full force for the first time?

[1] I’ve been reading a lot of the fresh drama around NaNoWriMo in the last month or two thanks to Reddit algorithms, and I’m glad I’ve been out of that scene for something like 15 years. I feel bad for the people affected, both in the bad actor situations and the apparent incompetence among the so-called leadership that’s killing the program now.

[2] I have started using the free Reedsy editor, although I have not used their marketplace yet. It’s some of the best of Word, plus the formatting of Kindle Create, and then some. Even has an AI-enabled proofreader of sorts, suggesting missing words or punctuation, extras, miscapitalized or misspelled words, and little bits of structure. You can pay extra for more features, but the free version is enough for a reasonably good writer to make KDP-ready or even print-ready media. I may write more about it later in the year after I use more of its features and get a few titles out of the way.