Cannot wait for this movie.

Umm... yes please!

926 words a day.

Well, this is embarrassing, I haven’t written in so long. Life is busy, any parent knows that. Things have been crazy for me this spring; I got married, moved, sold a house, and we are now constantly working on transitioning 3 kids into a blended family. All of those are just excuses, but they are also all true.

This is my obligatory post about how many words I wrote last month, and it’s not many. But I also did some math and realised that my goal is still achievable. I set the goal to write 200,000 words in 2017, and if I don’t hit my goal, I’m letting my future-self down. I’m better than that, so I’m doubling down to meet my words goal. So time to put my thinking hat on and do a little math…

So far this year I have written 61,097 words, not bad but nowhere near half my goal of 200,000 and July is disappearing before my eyes. That leaves me with 138,903 words to write before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. To make the math a little easier I’m just dividing by 5 months left in the year to give myself some sick-days (12 of them to be exact) and that leaves me with a monthly goal of 27,781 words to still hit my target of 200,000. That actually makes me feel better because I had done that before, last January when I wrote 28,153 words. Granted that was my best month of writing EVER but still, it’s achievable because I have achieved a number greater than that before. If I take that monthly goal and break it down even further, I’m left with…



926 words a day. If I can buckle down and hit 926 words, I can still reach my goal. How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. Same for this, how can I write 3 books this year? 926 words a day, that’s how. So look for some future updates from me about how it’s going. I’ll be sure to let you know how I do in August and when the draft is finished. Until then, cheers!

...and that counts as progress, right?

Well, it has been a few months and I haven't made the progress I wanted to on my first draft.  And I haven't been updating the blog as often as I wanted to either, partially because I wasn't making the progress I wanted to on my first draft.  But the good news is that I'm updating you now and that counts as progress, right?

I would love to tell you all about the wonderful things that have been keeping me too busy to write over the last few months.  Things like getting married, moving into a new house, selling my old house, having 3 times as many daughters as I had before the wedding and learning all about blending families.  All of those things have happened in the last two months, but they are all still just excuses that kept me from hitting my daily word counts.  I can do better.  

The thing that really slowed me down was that I rewrote the first 12,000 words of my first draft to change it from 3rd person to 1st person.  I did some research and found that most of the successful books in my genre have been written in 1st person.  So I decided to make the change before progressing any further in the narrative.  And that process was terrible, it sucked the life right out my writing.  The wonderful daily activity of exploring the new world I was creating was suddenly replaced with mind-numbing editing.  My creativity and passion for the project fell off a cliff and I just couldn't bring myself to write in the mornings anymore.  

But I am writing again.  I have doubled-down my efforts and I'm plotting a lot more and doing more pre-writing so that I can just let the creativity flow again.  I'm not back up to the amazing numbers I was posting in January of this year, but I'm moving forward.  Anyway, I'm writing again and that is god news.  Cheers!

Words in January 2017

It's time for another edition of how many words can Chuck write in a month? That's right January is over, and it's time to update my total words written and the number of words I wrote in January. I've been looking forward to writing this post for a couple of weeks now. I like to do things where I can track progress and then I like to show improvement. Updates like this make me believe I can write a book, make that three books, this year.

I have to admit I struggled a bit more in January than it did in December. Some mornings it was harder to get my word counts, and there were some days where I didn't even write in the morning and had to make it up later in the day. There were some days where it was a slog, and I just wasn't motivated to work on the story I was supposed to. I worked on a couple other small projects, blog posts, and prewriting for my novel. But because of the discipline, I developed in December, I was able to write plenty in January, and make a lot of progress on all of those things.

So without further ado here are my word counts for January 2017. In January I was able to write 28,153 words. That is 12,620 more words than I wrote in December. I averaged 880 words per day. My goal of 548 words per day was designed to keep me on track to break 200,000 words this year. If I can keep posting monthly word counts like this one, I should write over 330,000 words in 2017. But I'm not sure that I can keep this pace up.

I have just raised the bar for myself, setting a new goal of breaking my best month of writing and setting my sights on 28,200 words.  Or maybe even 30,000 words.  As luck would have it, my 31 days of writing in January is followed by the shortest month of the year, February.  With only 28 days in February, I really need to up my daily word count to have a chance of setting a new, monthly high score.  To break 30,000 words in February, I would need to write 1,072 words a day.  It’s doable but much higher than my daily goal of 548 words.

Speaking of daily goals, I set a new daily high score in January on the 8th.  My record for words written in a single day is now 2,912.  That Sunday happened to be a calm morning where I had a few hours to myself before church, and I was in the zone, detailing the background for my book finishing my prewriting.  I only missed my daily goal of 548 words 4 times in January, for a much better completion percentage of 87.1%.  Compared to December’s 22.6% that is a big improvement.  

In addition to writing 28,153 words in January, I also edited 17,949 words. I'm having a little trouble balancing writing new words each day and editing the words that I have written. It has become clear to me that nothing I write is worthy of being published after the first draft. I need at least one solid edit and some rewrites to get something to a level I'm comfortable with sending to an editor. The same goes for these blog posts, I write them, but then I let them sit for a day (usually) then I read them again, edit them and rewrite portions of them. I saw one of my author friends post a motivational quote on Facebook that rewriting is writing. That statement holds true for me.

I believe I said this before in a previous post, but my goal is to write three first drafts and to publish one of them this year. I need to have new words to keep chipping away at that larger goal of three manuscripts. I also need to edit the words I have written, so that one of the manuscripts may be publishable at the end of the year. Like I said it is a balance. I feel like I could have written more this month, but at the end of the month, I started writing for half the time and editing for the other half of the time. I think this is a better process for me because last month I only edited 6,443 words. So just like my writing is a little bit each day I feel I need to make my editing a little bit each day as well so it is not such a daunting task.

Here is a graph showing might December words written versus my January. I started off strong in January but barely coasted into the finish line by the end of the month, usually just writing my minimum daily words. Part of this was a lack of direction, prewriting and outlining for my novel. I believe I have addressed those issues and I can continue to plow forward with the novel. The other part of that is the editing I discussed above, and I need to be editing as I go so that I can continue to do new words as well. I also hope that as I continue to learn how to edit my work, it will keep me from making as many mistakes in the days ahead. This approach should lead to less editing in the future as I learn from my mistakes. But this is just a theory, and I will let you know how it went in a future blog post.

So in total, I have written around 43,686 words since this journey began 62 days ago. I have one 12,000-word short story that I'm not super proud of, that I'm still editing, and will probably never publish. However, I learned a lot from that process: about plotting, character arcs, and wrapping up a story. I also have over 10,000 words done on the first draft of my novel, and another 10,000 words of prewriting for that same novel. I have a handful of blog posts and a few ideas for future stories. Those were all things I did not have at Thanksgiving last year. So as I press on in my journey to write, I would like to encourage you to reach your goals as well. Even if they seem daunting, just take them one step at a time, and in a few months, you could be much closer to reaching your goals. Cheers!

Here is what I'm planning to read this year

Charles's to-read book montage

Charles Franklin's favorite books »

Why 200,000 words?

I thought it might be a good idea to talk a little more about why I choose 200,000 words as my 2017 writing goal.  At first glance, it seems like sort of a random number.  To be honest, it IS a random number.  But I did put a little more thought into it that just picking a number out of a hat.  So here are a few points to make me feel better about this goal.

First, 200,000 is a lot of words.  It's not one of the goals that I won't have to work at.  I did the math, of course, before I settled on this plan and to reach my goal I would have to write 548 new words each day.  That's without taking a single day off, not my birthday, or Thanksgiving, or even a sick day when I can't get out of bed.  Also, during my December writing challenge (when I started writing daily) I averaged only 501 words per day.  I exceeded 548 words only 7 times out of 31, for a pitiful compliance percentage of 22.6%.  This goal wasn't going to be a walk in the park by any stretch.

Second, I want to write a book.  Several books actually, but before there can be many there need to be at least one.  I did a little research, and the average novel is around 60,000 to 70,000 words.  I knew that my goal needed to be more than just write a book because I have also heard many authors talk about success coming from continuing a series more than just releasing a stand-alone title.  Continuing to produce work after I have published my first book is going to be critical in calling myself a writer.  I am a writer; not I was a writer.  So by my crude math, I figure that if I can write at least 200,000 words in 2017 that I should be able to have three first drafts of novels.  Not necessarily finished books, but a good place to start.  And I am hoping that at least one of those three drafts will be worth publishing.

Third, I needed a big splashy number to get people's attention.  Saying I wrote a book is impressive.  Saying that I wrote more words than the population of the Territory of Guam (estimated population of 161,785 in July of 2016) is splashy.  It is also a bit more fun to track in a spreadsheet than a chart that shows books written at zero until around May, then only goes to one until September.  You get the idea.

Fourth, this is a stepping stone to larger word counts and more books written.  I honestly believe that I can write more than 200,000 words this year.  But if I just base my goal off of my December 2016 words written I should only have a hair over 186,000 written by the end of the year.  I wanted to push myself to do better, but also allow myself time to do other things related to writing.  Keep in mind; this goal is NEW words written.  I don't count words edited.  From what I have experienced so far, editing is a much more labor-intensive process (but I'll save that discussion for another post).

Can I make it?  Time will tell.  Having something to strive for is the point of setting a goal.