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 ending 17 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.
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- 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. ↩︎