The Writings on the Wall #40
Looking back at 2024...
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So I finally found some time to sit down and work out my numbers for 2024. As I suspected, they’re not great. In fact, they’re worse than the previous year! I ended 2023 with 310,786 words, which is already low for me; this year I only wrote 220,502. Mind you, in the greater scheme of things, it’s still a decent number—I mean, that’s the equivalent of two or three novels. But I know I can do better and it’s frustrating when I don’t meet my own expectations.
One reason for the low number is that there were way too many days when I didn’t write at all (232 in 2024 vs 216 in 2023). Meaning those 220,502 words were written over a span of only 134 days—that’s an average of 1646 words a day, which is decent if not as high as my norm.
So anyway, here’s how that number breaks down:
80,595 words spread across 57 film reviews and 3 other film-related articles.
81,872 words spread across 13 short stories.
3,599 words formed two TV-related articles.
43,522 words completed a novel I started in 2023.
10,914 words for a non-fiction book about House of the Dragon, Season 2.
Again, those are overall pretty healthy numbers, but imagine what they could have been if I’d written more often! I’m dismayed that I only wrote (roughly) a third of the year. I need to do better.
Plans for this year (there are many!) include an epic fantasy trilogy in the Dragon Dice universe (this will be a co-writing job with Christopher Schmitz), an “interactive fiction” game, that damned murder mystery (I’ll tame that beast yet!), Book 4 of Through the Stars, Darkly, possibly a few other novels, and of course more short stories and film/TV articles, reviews, and books. Phew.
OK. I can do this. Time to roll up my sleeves and jump in.
Let’s see how 2025 turns out.
Recently published stories
Here’s a list of the stories I published in 2024 outside of Substack:
“The Waystation” in Tome of Terrors (horror anthology)
“The Battle of Braxia” in Laser Cannons & First Contact (space opera anthology)
“Strength of the Gwich’in,” “The Scales of Death,” and “Under Siege” (as Steffen Larken) in Time of the Champions (epic fantasy anthology in the “Dragon Dice” game setting)
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Copyright (c) 2025 by Alex S. Garcia.