On writing as play, 2024 wins, and 2025 goals
Hi friends,
It’s that time! The one time a year I reliably send a newsletter or write a blog post, to update with what all I did last year. Here’s an archive of word counts from the last, gosh, decade. I’ve focused less on word count stats in recent years, though — I know I consistently draft about 1,000 words in a 30-minute sprint, and I know that if I focus only on how many words I write in a year I feel crappy about times when I’m not producing words… even if I’m doing something equally important, like editing.
So let me bottom-line the wordcount bit: in 2024, I wrote about 158,000 words. Which is wild, tbh. It’s the most I’ve written since I’ve been tracking these word counts, including when I drafted a novel under deadline, threw it out, and re-drafted it. Amazing!
I am now fighting an inner demon made of Protestant work ethic that wants me to confess, these were not all productive words; they were not all words intended for publication. The thing is, I’m not Protestant. And I’m trying to defeat productivity, grind-culture brainworms. So screw that.
Here’s the deal: I worked on two projects this year. One — the one I’ve written about switching up my process for — is epic fantasy. Let’s call it Decay Book, because that’s the last spoilery of the various project names I’ve used for it. The other I’ll call the Cult Project and it’s… well, it’s a bunch of projects in one, and most importantly, it’s playtime.
What I mean is this: I don’t know if the Cult Project will ever see the light of day, and not in the usual “I don’t know if I’ll get an agent or if it will get published” way. I mean it in an an all-new, “I’m treating this like it’s fanfiction for a series that doesn’t exist yet and only writing what I feel like, which doesn’t happen to be a coherent novel but who cares, I love these characters and wish to write thousands of words of hurt/comfort about them” way. Like, I know what happens in the, ehrm… canon, I guess, for these characters. I do hope that someday I’ll get around to writing it! But for now I’m indulging myself by writing whatever the heck I want to about them, with zero pressure on myself to meet goals or try to turn this into something for public consumption. It’s my playground. It’s what I keep open in the background at all times to add a few sentences or paragraphs or thousands of words to on any given day, whenever I happen to feel like it, with no rhyme or reason to the scenes I choose to tackle. And because this is entirely just for me, it’s also 100% driven by my id and exactly what I want to have happen — whether or not it makes any sense, and no matter how cringe — and that means it’s so fun.
So yeah: of those 158,000 words, about 110,000 of them are the Cult Project. Writing those is easy and delightful. The rest are the Decay Book, which is less easy to write but is actually intended for people to read someday. I’m extremely proud of it, actually, and I don’t want it to sound like working on that has been a drag or anything — it’s the difference between professional writing and hobby writing. They’re both fun, they’re both writing, but professional writing requires a level of concentration, effort, and polish that hobby writing does not. Since I sold my books a decade ago, I’ve been mostly focused on professional writing. Rediscovering hobby writing is a delight and a complement to the professional stuff.
Soooo, with all that said, let’s check back in on the goals I set for 2024.
Goal one: finish the draft of the Decay Book. Check! I completed it in May, just about a year after I started drafting it. It was, at that point, about 101,000 words, and by far the most solid first draft I’ve ever written. Hooray!
Goal two: write 10,000 words a month until the draft is done. No check there. If we’re talking about only until the draft was completed, I only hit that 10k mark in February — but oh well, I still got the draft done. If we look at that 10k mark throughout the year, then including the cult nonsense, I actually hit it six times. Which is pretty neat!
Goal three: be flexible, and be kind to myself, because some progress is better than none. Check, I think! I didn’t feel bad about the months I came in under goal, and I obviously did a lot of very joyful writing without feeling (too) bad that it’s not meant for publication.
Goal four: finish the first revision pass on the Decay book. I’m super proud that this is also a check! I said before, this was the most solid first draft I’ve ever written… which means that while there were some structural fixes and rewrites, the giant first revision was not nearly as meaty as it usually is for me (and I didn’t have to toss the entire thing and start over, which I’ve done many times before, and that was a HUGE relief). This revision brought it up to about 110,000 words — a bit heftier than I’d like but pretty in line with epic fantasy, so not too bad.
So all in all: I think I met the goals that were most important to me, and enjoyed myself in the process. I’m calling my 2024 writing a win. Hooray!
And now, what about 2025? Well, just a few goals this time. Gulp.
Goal one: I want to do another — final? — revision pass on the Decay book and start querying it. (Ugh, but, you know, a necessity for traditional publishing.) If it needs multiple revision rounds, fair enough, I’ll do however many it takes but I’d like to be done with it by the end of the year. (Actually I’m hoping that it’ll be over the summer, but we’ll say end of the year.)
Over the last few days I reread it, and I’m getting feedback from some readers in January. I’m hoping this will be my planning month, with actual revisions and polish happening in the next few months following, and then, like I said, to be querying over the summer. We’ll see how that goes.
Goal two: figure out what comes next. I mean this specifically on the professional writing side. I have a few ideas percolating, but none of them solid enough to start real work on yet. I can’t control what happens when I send the Decay book out into the world, so I want to have something on deck to work on.
Goal three: pre-write and zero draft. Obviously this relies on goal two being successful. The new process stuff I keep talking about seemed to work well for the Decay book, so let’s see if I can do it again: spend more time intentionally noodling around and figuring the project out before diving in, and then zero draft… something. With the Decay book, it was a NaNoWriMo project that reached 50k but only consisted of a first act, a midpoint, a low point, and a climax, with no connective tissue or real story. It gave me most of the characters and jumpstarted the worldbuilding, though, and without it my first real draft would not have been as smooth as it was. Maybe this’ll be another November project, maybe not — I guess that’ll depend on how the first two goals go. But I’d like to have it done by the end of the year, so I can jump into 2026 ready to start a real draft.
And that’s it. No word count goals — well, we’ll see how that zero draft goes, but I’m not putting specific benchmarks around it — and, importantly, no goals around the Cult Nonsense. Hobby writing will remain just that: a hobby, with zero goals, zero pressure, zero anything. If I ever do make it into anything, cool! If not, well… it’s just for fun, and as long as it remains fun, that’s all I need from it. Or I could abandon it at a moment’s notice!
As for non-writing stuff, I had a pretty good 2024. I went to Japan! I took pottery classes! I may or may not ever send a newsletter about those things, but this one is already almost 1400 words long so I’m going to end it here.
I hope you are doing well, having a cozy winter, and will have a great new year.
—Becky