January Progress

Since the month is ending today, I decided to compare my monthly totals to last year. 2010 didn't feel like my most productive year overall, so I was curious to see if I was off to a better start. And yay! I am!

Nitty Gritty
This month, I wrote 3541 words of nonfiction and 32,058 words of fiction.
Last year, I wrote 1232 words of nonfiction and 19,311 words of fiction.

Last year's nonfiction was all client work. This year I included blog posts I've been preparing for the March Madness promotion I'm doing with MJ Fredrick. So you kind of have to shrug off the difference there.

But the fiction? That I'm proud of. In 2010, I wrote pretty steadily on Full Fusion, the paranormal YA adventure I'd started during NaNo, but it took pushing hard on a retreat the final weekend to get it done. This year, I not only finished my second YA (featuring ghosts!), I worked steadily on an adult romantic adventure, too. That one's almost done.

I like writing first drafts. They're so easy to quantify. If I meet my goals and finish Entanglement this week as well as my synopsis for Hummingbird, my next project will be revision, and that doesn't lend itself to comparisons. Sure, I can do X number of pages per day, but might not increase the word count. Might decrease it.

Which is fine, of course. The important thing is the quality of the book that comes out at the end. Wish me luck that I 2011 is the year of quality as well as quantity. :)