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Let me be the first to wish you all a very happy new year!
What do you mean, I’m not the first? Ack. Alright, never mind. I wish you a happy new year regardless.
Hope you all had a great time for the holidays and didn’t go too crazy on the sweets.
On the plus side, I didn’t catch Covid this time like I did last year!
I’m still at my mom’s, though, and expect to be for the months to come. That said, I think I’ve found a way to make it work. Ironically, December was my third busiest month of 2023, despite having moved in with her, with 51k words written—vs 97k in May and 56k in June, it went downhill after that, with a dismal 2k in October.
Coming up this month
Sorry, but this will be another one-story month… Heck, more like half-a-story-month, since I’ll be posting the second part of The Glass Hand of the Emerald God on January 17.
This is the third installment in the Silius Chronicles. I had not intended it to be split in two like this, but it turned out much longer than I anticipated.
The good news is that I plan to spend most of the next two months writing short stories, so that should help increase my output on Substack.
“Write 6 Books in a Year Challenge”
Update #12 and final thoughts
This time last year, I decided to give myself a challenge: write 6 books (meaning novels in my mind) in a year.
I know it might sound crazy—and maybe it is—but it sounded reasonable at the time. Why? Because I tend to be a fast writer and, looking at my past numbers, I wrote 879,499 words in 2021 and 807,717 in 2022. So I assumed I’d be able to pull off something similar in 2023.
Turned out I was wrong.
I ended up instead with ‘only’ 387,472 words.
There were several reasons for this I’ve already mentioned in previous posts, so I won’t go into too much details here. But to sum it up, I stupidly messed up my outline for one novel, and had to deal with both family and financial issues.
Don’t get me wrong, 387k is nothing to sneeze at. I mean, if you consider that an average novel is about 80k, that’s the equivalent of 4 or 5 books. So I wasn’t that far off.
But, in the end, here’s a breakdown of what I accomplished:
13 short stories
4 non-fiction (short) books + 1 partial
1 novel + 3 partial
31 non-fiction articles (most of them published on my other Substack)
1 novel as a translator
I could say I pulled it off… cause, you know, 1 novel translated + 1 novel written + 4 non-fiction books add up to six. But I’m not gonna do that. Because in my mind it was supposed to be 6 full-length books I wrote myself. So the translated job doesn’t count (not my own creation), nor do the non-fiction books (they’re under 40 pages each).
So yeah, I failed on this one. Based on the rules I set up for myself.
But you know what? We can’t always succeed in everything we try to achieve. Life doesn’t work that way, and that’s fine. At the very least, we can learn from our failures.
What I’ve learned here is that I shouldn’t put so much pressure on myself. Life can throw stuff at you—and it’s not like I didn’t already know that—and I’d rather work at my own rhythm than try to force things to happen a certain way.
Ironically, that mystery novel? I haven’t even started on it yet. I ended up focusing last month on short stories instead, as there were several submission calls I wanted to answer, and I managed to complete and submit three pieces.
And that’s pretty much all I have to say about this experience.
So, from now on, I’ll be more relaxed with my writing—and I might even end up with a million words by the end of 2024… Now, wouldn’t that be something?
Thanks for reading, and see you all next month for more news!
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Copyright (c) 2023 by Alex S. Garcia.