All I can say about last week is that it wasn’t as bad as my worst week of the month. And this past month was bad. I mean, bad, nowhere near what I’m expecting of myself.
Here they are:
Writing statistics for the week ending28 February 2026: Words: 2,973 Days writing: 5 of 7. Days revising or planning: 1 of 7 for 120 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 5 of 7 days.
Writing statistics for February 2026: Words: 12,089 Revise/planning: 270 minutes. DWGM: 64%
Whelp, nearly 10,000 words less than last month. And I missed my daily goals more than one out of every three days. In short: total absolute rubbish. I have been fighting against my old friend of procrastination, that hangs out and temps me into distraction.
I’m also in a situation where I realize I’m in something of a … I won’t say rut, but I’m feeling like I’m doing a lot of background setting and not enough tension and dread for what should be a sci-fi environmental horror project. This I’ve given the working title of The Land, The River, and The Waste, (I am so superstitious about revealing a real title until I am closer to publishing), set in a little Mississippi River town in Iowa. I’m getting the feeling of more sightseeing and not enough horror. I always loved how Stephen King would slowly turn up the temperature of his stories ever so slowly until you found yourself as a reader in the maelstrom of chaos he’d create.
So: more chaos, less sightseeing. Plus, I have Spring Break this month so I should have a bit more time to write this month, I believe. Back to the 20,000-word mark, hopefully.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
I’ve had some rough weeks that have been under-productive, to say the least. It’s just been me stubbornly staring at the screen and expecting the words just to fly onto the screen.
The numbers:
Writing statistics for the week ending21 February 2026: Words: 3,128 Days writing: 6 of 7. Days revising or planning: 0 of 7 for 0 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 4 of 7 days.
Too many distractions is all I can say. I need to break the streak I’ve been running nearly this entire month. Somehow I get the feeling the month of February is a slump month for me, and I have to keep this in mind for next year and beyond.
The project I call (for now; I’m so superstitious of working titles) The Land, The River, and The Waste, an environmental horror tale set in a little Mississippi River town in Iowa, is my main fiction focus. I need to stop screwing around and get the action going in this story; there seems to be a few too much talk talk and not enough go go to it. If I want to have a rough draft by Halloween 2026… you know.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
I’ve only got two weeks to turn around what is turning out to be not so good of a month as January was. Writing a book is an accomplishment, but it’s always easier to have a rough draft in your hands rather than trying to write it.
And cell phones are the devil, kids. Take my word for it.
The numbers:
Writing statistics for the week ending14 February 2026: Words: 3,293 Days writing: 7 of 7. Days revising or planning: 3 of 7 for 90 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 5 of 7 days.
If you want to compare last week to the previous week, I’m ahead by every measurable criteria, which is objectively a good thing.
I often talk about the esoteric reasons why I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, but the past two weeks can be narrowed down to one thing: I get too damn distracted by my cell phone and the things I can see and play on it, if I am to be perfectly honest. Only when I have it plugged in is when I could write a whole bunch and not scroll idly on YouTube, Tubi, Substack, Medium, Facebook, and Universe knows what else. Procrastination and distraction are my devil.
The project I’m calling (for now; I’m so superstitious of working titles) The Land, The River, and The Waste, an environmental horror tale set in a little Mississippi River town in Iowa, is my main fiction focus, but I didn’t make a massive amount of progress on it last week. I only increased the rough manuscript from 31,000 to more than 32,000, which is not a lot for a week’s work. If I want to have a rough draft by Halloween 2026, I need to get the bloody show on the road.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Welcome, everyone. This is my monthly newsletter about a teacher, ex-journalist, and part-time novelist from eastern Iowa (me, Jason Liegois) and what’s been going on with me, especially when it comes to my writing and myself.
Let’s get started.
What I’m Writing Right Now
[NOTE: For more detailed summaries/synopses of the works in progress I discuss below, go to this link. Also note, all titles except those of my series are working titles. This is the reason for that.]
The Land, The River, and The Waste
This is my environmental sci-fi horror tale situated in the type of quiet Mississippi River town in Iowa I’ve grown up and lived in most of my life. In a state where agricultural pollution and its effects on the people and environment are a big deal, I thought a horror story might be appropriate for the times. Also, as a writer from Iowa, I wanted to finally set one of my stories in a familiar setting.
Status: Right now this is the top creative priority for me. I got started on it on Halloween Night of last year and I’m already at 31,000 words for the rough draft. One of my goals is to have at least the rough draft wrapped up by Halloween of next year. I have no idea of how it’s getting published or where it’s coming out, but I believe in this story. It’s coming out, one way or another.
The Fool 2
This is the sequel to my first book, The Holy Fool. It follows the adventures of ex-Chicago newspaper columnist turned independent blogger journalist Sam “Sonny” Turner, as he and his correspondents struggle to get the news out about America during troubled times.
Status: This is the number two priority for me right now. I am in the strange situation of writing a historical novel, so to speak, in real time. I am picturing a book beginning in November 2024 and ending in November 2026, so I feel the need to observe what is happening before I wrap up the story. 4 July 2026 will be an important date to observe as well, because this will be Sonny Turner’s 50th birthday1. There’s no projected date.
The Yank Striker 3
This is the third in a series about DJ Ryan, a one-time high school and college football star turned prospective pro soccer player for the underdog Donford FC of London. After facing a setback in his climb to success, he’s relentless in seeking an opportunity to get back on the winning road.
Status: I still believe in this project, but I don’t want to have three/fourths of my books to be The Yank Striker series. I want to make sure I have some other back catalogue (so to speak) before putting another Yank Striker book out there. Not that I don’t believe in the series, but I want to be more than that. I’m guessing the story won’t be coming out until at least 2027 at this point2.
Kayfabe Stories Part 1
The first in a series of stories featuring Robbie Traynor, a creative writing grad student at the University of Iowa. His thesis project is a novel about a young man seeking to reconnect with his father, a professional wrestler. Robbie himself is from a family of pro wrestlers, but has had little connection with the art – until his research for the novel pulls him closer to a life that horrifies and fascinates him all at once.
Status: Not actively adding to this project, but I am revising it based on the feedback I have been receiving from my writing groups (especially the Midwest Writing Center, shout out to them). With more than 50,000 words into the rough draft, there’s no way I’m abandoning this project, even if I have to self-publish it on Ingram Sparks or whatever.
I’m thinking at least a trilogy and two spin-off novels spanning from 1954 to 2019. Can’t wait to share them with you.
Me hanging out at the Burlington, Iowa, public library, 7 February 2025. One of my favorite libraries to be honest.
What I’m Doing Having to do With Writing
For once, I have some new events to announce.
This week, at 11 AM Saturday, Feb 21, I’ll be making my first appearance at The Corner, Mediapolis’ new indie bookstore right on 703 Main St. It’ll be my first appearance there, although they already have my books.
On Saturday Feb. 28, I’ll be back at @beaverdalebooks , one of my favorite indie bookstores in Iowa, for their local author fair. That’ll run between 1-3 PM. I’m looking forward to being back there in Des Moines once again, and am looking forward to the DSM Bookfair as well. See you there!
The Home Front
Not too much to say.
My wife is trying to sort out her mother’s home now that she’s passed. Whenever people die, there’s always circumstances which have to get sorted out. People who have passed on have a certain momentum, if you will.
My son’s going to get married this July. His future bride is a good girl, and I hope he has as much happiness as I’ve had with his mother and my wife.
For those complaining about the weather: it’s a hell of a lot better than 100 degree days in the summer.
All the rest of it I’ll keep to myself for now.
Writing Quote(s) of the Month:
This first one is from one of my favorite writers (and creators) in the realm of film.
To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.
― Akira Kurosawa
I haven’t read any of his works, but I think his philosophy on writing style approaches my own philosophy.
People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.
Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.
― Ruskin Bond, Best Of Ruskin Bond
When and What I Post
Check this out for when and what I post on a regular basis.
How to support me😊.
As always, go to the links on the side if you are reading this on a desktop/laptop or the links on my profile on mobile. If you follow the links, you will be able to buy both the paperback and ebook versions of my books on Amazon. If you just put “Jason Liegois” in Google. you’ll find them on the first page of search results.
I have quite a few places that now carry at least some of my books, some of the many great and fantastic independent bookstores in Iowa and the Midwest. These are the bookstores you’ll find at least some of my work3:
Bent Oak Books, 619 7th St. Fort Madison.
Burlington By The Book, 301 Jefferson St, Burlington.
The Corner and More, 703 Main St., Mediapolis.
Green Point Mercantile, 217 E. 2nd St., Muscatine.
The Brewed Book, 1524 Harrison St., Davenport.
The Black Rose, 116 W. Main St., West Branch
Beaverdale Books, 2629 Beaver Ave. # S1, Des Moines.
Pella Books, 824 Franklin St, Pella.
The Atlas Collective, 1801 5th Ave, Moline, Illinois.
I’m always looking for some new places to place my books, so feel free to hit me up in the comments if you have a suggestion.
For those who are budget conscious among all of you, my books are part of the collections of the Fort Madison, Burlington, and eventually at the Musser (Muscatine) public libraries.
My poetry book The Flow and the Journey is available at Bent Oak, Green Point, Burlington By the Book, and The Corner and More, but it is also available online but not on Amazon. See below.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
This does mean Sonny Turner was born 4 July 1976. And yes, there’s a thematic reason for this; you’re welcome. ↩︎
For subsequent updates, I may not discuss other what I might call “inactive” projects every month. So, news on these projects might be more few and far between. ↩︎
I had a good last month and a decent week before last week … but this weekend was pretty much rubbish. Hence the photo with this story. Before I was inconsistent but at least produced some work; this previous week I was inconsistent and unproductive.
The numbers:
Writing statistics for the week ending7 February 2026: Words: 2,695 Days writing: 4 of 7. Days revising or planning: 1 of 7 for 60 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 4 of 7 days.
As for why I’m dawdling, I think it’s because I’ve let distractions get over on me and I’m trying to distract myself when I don’t necessarily need to. I feel much better about myself if I remain productive.
The project I started this last Halloween I’m calling (for now; I’m so superstitious of working titles) The Land, The River, and The Waste, an environmental horror tale set in a little Mississippi River town in Iowa.
On that project, I’m now past the 31,000 word mark. Halloween 2026 would be a good, solid deadline for the first draft to be ready, but maybe I can get it done even earlier.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Last week, again, was not a massive success, as I was not keeping up the pace I wanted to hit to keep up my pace to his this year’s productivity numbers. However, this month was a fantastic start for my year, so I’m balancing the bad with the good and hoping I can have some more consistent production for the rest of the year. However, if every month winds up being what this one was… I’m likely to more than meet my goals as a result.
Here are my totals for both the previous week and the previous month:
Writing statistics for the week ending31 January 2026: Words: 4,223 Days writing: 5 of 7. Days revising or planning: 0 of 7 for 0 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 5 of 7 days.
Writing statistics for January 2026: Words: 21,205 Revising or planning: 90 minutes. DWGM: 74%.
This week’s numbers are a bit low for what I’m trying to average during a week, but only by less than 200 words. Consistency has been my biggest issue this month, which means I’ve had days when I’ve done absolutely nothing and days I’ve written 2,000 words, which is a bit much.
Right now I have a “soft goal” of 230,000 words for 2026. I think it is absolutely doable, considering I wrote only 4,000 or so less words last year. I need to write a little more than 19,000 words per month to reach that goal, but every little bit helps. For example, if I write 20,000 words per month for the next 11 months, I’ll easily hit 240,000 words instead. That’s the equivalent of at least three novel-sized manuscripts, which is a bit eye-opening to me.
project I started this last Halloween I’m calling (for now; I’m so superstitious of working titles) The Land, The River, and The Waste, an environmental horror tale set in a little Mississippi River town in Iowa.
On that project, I’m now past the 30,000 word mark. Halloween 2026 would be a good, solid deadline for the first draft to be ready, but maybe I can get it done even earlier.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Although last week was not a massive success, it did barely meet what I am trying to do as far as writing productivity, so I felt good about those results… and what might be upcoming. More in a bit on that.
First, let’s get into the numbers for last week.
Writing statistics for the week ending24 January 2026: Words: 4,503 Days writing: 5 of 7. Days revising or planning: 2 of 7 for 90 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 5 of 7 days.
Although the consistency of my production was not quite up to the previous week’s level (6 out of 7 days meeting daily goals), in every other measurement I was keeping busier than before.
My “soft goal” of 230,000 words for 2026 is ambitious, but I think it’s doable considering I wrote only 4,000 or so less words last year and 4,000 words is a subpar week for me nowadays. At some point I’m going to write fewer words than I did the previous year, but the last time it happened was four years ago, and I’ve been on an upward trend since then. Having set a yearly goal ahead of time rather than after the fact has been a benefit for me.
This year, I decided to figure out some monthly and weekly averages I want to reach if I wanted to reach 230,000 words for the year. Figuring the averages, this would mean I’d need to write 630 words daily, 4,423 words weekly, and 19,167 per month. So, any totals over those in the weeks and months to come will be fantastic.
As of right now, I’m at 16,980 words as of the end of last week. Starting the year off with a 20,000-plus word January would be a big boost to start the year.
Speed and productivity are the watchwords for this year. I want to get this project I started this last Halloween I’m calling (for now; I’m so superstitious of working titles) The Land, The River, and The Waste, an environmental horror tale set in a little Mississippi River town in Iowa. I said last week To raise the stakes, get a dog involved. I just started the scene a few days ago, and some pet owners might not be happy with me, but I think I had to do it this way.
On that project, I’m now over 27,000 words and think I’ll need at least 50,000 more to give me a decent-sized first-draft novel. If I could have the first draft wrapped up by this Halloween, that might be the fastest turnaround I’ve ever had on a novel.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
It’s a bit cold outside for the past couple of days. That might have been on my mind when I wrote these.
Sorry if I’m not profound tonight
Modern Igloos
Fort Madison, Iowa, 24 January 2026
Frost paint windows off white
The cold invades where you’re closest to the outdoors
Only stone, wood, electrified heat sources, and a cup of tea
Hold off the entropy.
You think back to the old cartoons
Inuit chilling both ways in igloos
And being thankful for civilization
Because you know you couldn’t answer the Call of the Wild.
Didn’t want to do another winter poem, so I combined the cold weather with one of my recent obsessions, the ocean. It’s a weird obsession considering I only lived near the ocean for a very short time in my childhood and for most of my life I’ve never lived closer than 850 miles than the nearest part of the ocean (Gulf of Mexico). But maybe living near the Mississippi River sparked something like it with me. Apologies are likely in order for my parents who once had a catamaran for sailing on the the lakes in Iowa but I was not as enthusiastic about it back in those days like I should have been.
I started thinking about the old sailors who make the trip around Cape Horn in southern Chile. I’ve long heard legends about how challenging the trip was. This is me picturing what it might be like.
Cape Horn Days
24 January 2026, Fort Madison, Iowa
On the bridge, morning watch,
Sealed coffee mug fastened in the holder
Protection from the fifty-foot waves
And the blows of the Horn’s gales.
It’s not like it was with the old clipper sailors.
We have a restaurant-level galley and temperature-controlled cabins,
They had a fire pit, iron kettle, swaddled in wool to keep cold and water away.
We have electronic GPS navigation and radar, WiFi and satellite radio,
They had compass and charts if lucky, the stars and waves if they weren’t.
Steel and polymer vessels are far stronger than
Their wooden clipper ancestors.
But they both had to dodge typhoons and icebergs alike.
The Horn looms in the distance through his binoculars
Its waters wild, beautiful, and treacherous.
Now for a quick commercial break, lol.
If You’re Interested in the Poetry You See Here… You Might Want to Check Out Some More…
Since Substack doesn’t have the setup for this (that I’m aware of), I’ve set up something at my WordPress sister site, Liegois Media. I have my own Internet storefront page where you can order my chapbook for $6 per copy. The link is below.
Hope 2026 is going all right, all things considered. Take care everyone.
-30-
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
I do try to check out some of the good blogging on WordPress, but I have to admit I spend a good portion of my time on Substack. It was when I was tooling around on Substack a while back that I read an interesting article about drafting techniques in writing. Although I’m usually not the type of writer to base their posts on someone else’s writings, I thought what the author, Mason Currey, had to say interesting enough to get into it here.
The entire article, “Rip it up and start again,” can be found here. Everyone talks about revisions or prewriting (me included), so I often don’t see a lot of advice or instruction out there about the drafting process. Below, I intend to summarize some of the techniques described in the article, analyze what concepts they have in common, and explain why I wouldn’t probably try them myself.
Let’s get started!
Rip it up
I was not too familiar with Currey initially, although he is from Los Angeles and is the author, among other things, of The Daily Rituals series, and he’s done a few other things as well. This article was enough to get me to subscribe to him on Substack.
First, Mason shares a writing technique suggested by the bestselling author Oliver Burkeman. This technique involves writing out a manuscript draft, printing off said draft, deleting the draft, and then retyping out the draft onto computer.
At first glance, this seems like extra work, but Burkeman explains it allows him to make changes and deletions to the manuscript more naturally. As he put it:
It’s like: I’ve written this thing, I’m not happy with it yet. I print it out, I type back in. Typing it back in is just admin work, right? It doesn’t tax my soul in some terrible pretentious writer way. It’s just typing it back in.
Mason also discusses two other techniques that I might classify as “radical separation.” The first of these was suggested by Taika Waititi, the man behind What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Love and Thunder, among others. He described writing one or two drafts of a story, putting it away for as much as a year, rereading it once or twice, either throwing it away or locking it away, and then rewriting the manuscript from memory. The director explains why he finds this to be a good revision technique:
And what I think is useful about that is you filter out all the stuff that doesn’t seem very important. So what happens is your 120-page script suddenly become 70 pages. And it’s just the bare bones, the very slim, sleek structure of your film. And that’s when you can start putting in more jokes or, like, the tonal stuff that makes it your own thing.
The last of these came from the author Lauren Groff, a three-time National Book Award finalist, which is similar in principle to the others if not in exact execution. She writes out a first draft longhand in a notebook, puts the notebook in storage, and then rewrites the entire book from memory in longhand for what will become the true first draft.
On an unrelated note, Mason also lets us know that Groff works on multiple writing projects at once and even puts them in different locations. Although I’m not that extreme, I do have a tendency to work on more than one project at a time.
What each of these techniques have in common is an attempt to refine and improve the first or rough draft process, or at least to get a head start on the revision process. There is a clear tendency for people to pile in a lot of information and material into their first drafts. Dan Ackroyd was infamous for writing massive scripts for the movies he was starring in, such as The Blues Brothers. Shoot, the first draft I had for The Holy Fool was somewhere around 150,000 words and I ended up hacking more than 50,000 words from that rough draft to make it something approaching a tight narrative.
So, I can absolutely relate to this, especially to trying to get the overall shape of the story right the first time. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot, and you want to bring the story you want to tell to life from the beginning.
While I can understand the instinct behind these techniques, I don’t believe I want to use these in my own work. Now, I do write down the initial notes for my projects in longhand in notebooks, but I prefer to be typing when it comes to putting together a rough draft. Maybe it’s the journalist in me, or it’s the love and desire for typewriters I had as a kid in the pre-Internet era I as a Generation X kid grew up in1. I’m guessing part of my hesitation has something to do with this.
But the other part of my hesitation has something to do with my particular situation. To be frank, everyone, I have not been able to write a book in a shorter amount of time than two years. I am hopeful my horror special set in a small town on the Mississippi River might be the tale that breaks this streak, but procrastination and my work habits have kept my productivity, while not at a Harper Lee level, at not the best levels.
And this leads me to another issue. I have lived for more than a half century, and I am very much aware that the remaining portion of my life is not as long as what has come before me. To be honest, all three of these techniques seem to add to the length of the writing process than subtract from it. Whatever I am doing for the remaining years of my existence, I will be racing against time to write the stories I want to be writing. I have more than a few stories left to tell, and I would prefer to spending my final days trying to think of things to write rather than regretting the stories I didn’t have the chance to tell before I passed.
As far as avoiding some of the pitfalls these techniques are designed to avoid, I believe I am trying to avoid them by writing only the scenes I find most interesting to me and leaving the “filler” scenes until the very end, or just forgetting to write them (even better). But if these techniques work for you, by all means dive into them.
But…
As with all the advice I give around here, feel free to ignore it if you find it conflicts with writing habits or techniques which actually work for you. The number one piece of writing advice I ever have given my English, composition, and/or special education students is this:
If something is working to help you write well, whether or not it’s the recommended thing to do, keep doing it.
Next Time…
I’m planning on starting a deep dive into worldbuilding the next time I do a writing advice column. Hope it’s helpful to you writers out there.
My new notebook with my word counts for the year so far.
Sometimes I get down if I have a slow week. However, I’m glad I feel bothered by having an off-week rather than just passively accept it.
So, let’s see the numbers.
Writing statistics for the week ending17 January 2026: Words: 3,872 Days writing: 6 of 7. Days revising or planning: 0 of 7 for 0 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 6 of 7 days.
Other than being a bit more consistent in writing during different days, none of this is better than last week’s numbers. A good portion of my writing has been more blog-based rather than the fiction projects. And I feel like I’ve been hunting down my work in progress I got started last Halloween (see the paragraph after the next one). The writer S.E. Reid recently wrote a Substack Note about having her WIP go feral in the nearby woods and trying to convince it to come back home. That was a wonderful metaphor, but I think my story is more like the socially inappropriate friend who’s getting bored with conversing with me quietly, who’s impatient to get back to some of the crazy stories. I probably need to listen to it.
I’ve got a soft goal of 230,000 words for this year to write, and they’re not going to write themselves because I’m more wary of ChatGPT for fiction than the Bulterian Jihad of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe. At most I might use it as a beta reader for my rough drafts (pretty much what Grammerly or the Microsoft Word grammar editor already does), but if I use it to just write the draft, what’s the point of calling myself a writer, yeah?
The Land, The River, and The Waste (working title due to me being a superstitious sucker) is my top project now, an environmental horror tale set in a little river town on the Mississippi River in Iowa1. I’ve been trying to get a bit of the small-town feel of my setting, but I have the feeling I need to kick the action into high gear and I have an idea of what I need for it. To raise the stakes, get a dog involved. A bit ruthless, but I think it’s appropriate under the circumstances.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
To bump up the numbers this week, I might decide to do that big post about all of the works in progress currently in my document queue. As a matter of fact, I might start putting that together as soon as I finish up this piece. ↩︎
