What a month. It’s the shortest month of the year, but between teacher burnout and the Texas Snowpocalypse of 2021, it easily felt like the longest month. Understandably, I didn’t get much writing in for February.
I started the month off with 36,504 words and ended with a whopping 36,828. That’s a grand total of 324 words for February, folks.
Thanks to M.K. England, who talked about the writing game 4theWords on their Instagram, I was able to scrounge up a little under 3k words in January. No such luck in February. For the first three weeks, I wrote absolutely nothing. To be fair, the third week involved me either huddling under blankets with my dog trying to keep warm or living in someone else’s house until my pipes could be fixed, so I’m not all that upset about my word count. At the end of it all, I’m grateful to be in my home. With power. And heat. And water. It’s the little things, you know?
Despite the continued craziness of life, I’m actually really happy with the progress I’ve made on my book so far this year. With the writing I got in during January, I was able to finally make it out of the intro and through most of the inciting incident. I’m only a handful of chapters away from the middle, and despite the meddlesome middle’s reputation, I’m really excited about it.
I’ve outlined my middle to have a progression of try/fail cycles for the characters, as they talk about in the Writing Excuses podcast, and it’s the point of the story where my characters start interacting with one another and messing things up. I’m excited to see what comes out of them as they’re pushed beyond their boundaries and–as the sadistic writer I am–to set them up to succeed only to watch them fail again and again. It’s going to be so much fun, y’all.
Despite the stagnation of progress on my book, I did publish two posts on the blog last month and have several drafts saved. I consider that a huge win. I’ve missed blogging, so getting back into it is something I’m having a lot of fun with, which is exactly what I need in my life right now.
- Finish writing the Inciting Incident section–that’s 3 chapters total and should push me close to the 40k word count range.
- Publish 2 blog posts, including the writing skills master list post I’ve been diligently working on for months. My blogging reach goal is 1 post per week, but I’ll be happy with 2 posts for the month.
- Post on Instagram at least 1 time per week.
- March starting word count: 36,828
K. N. Dyer Books 