Jeremy C Kester

Two days. That was all that I’ve missed in a little over two months. Even still, those two days were (not) planned. My family had to make a special trip into Philadelphia, which since it is cheaper to drive (albeit much longer time-wise), that is what we did. The trip to and the trip back were days I legitimately had no time or energy to write—I am the driver after all—so the long and short of it stands that those two days were impossibilities. But enough with the excuses!

As of today, the day count is at 56 days in-a-row. Of course that is factoring out the two days. Since January 1st, I am averaging 1,043 words of fiction alone each day. That figure includes the days missed and the few days in the beginning of the year where I was writing, but only a few hundred words each day. For whatever reason, 1,000 words of fiction each day has been a minimum threshold for me for some time. Eventually, I’d like to take that up to 1,500 on the regular. After I reach that, who knows. I want to hit 1,500 first, then I might look beyond.

But for February, much like I did in January, I’ve made little steps towards consistency. I’ve started with a target of 100 extra words of fiction each day centered around writing a weekly 500-words-or-less piece of flash fiction to go up each Friday. I am already done this Friday’s piece and am busy with the story that will go up March 6th. I’ve also got back into the posting a poem every Wednesday. (Let’s face it, I never grew out of the whole writing poetry thing that so many angsty teenagers go through.) All in all, along with the posting something on the blog each day, I am now getting to a point that I can keep up with the extra content—without killing myself.

As an aside—it’s why I chose to make the limit on my stories roughly 500 words or less. It keeps them short and manageable. That’s not to say that they won’t sometimes go over or under that target, but the intention is to use that limit as a challenge. It’ll be fun to see how many of them I am successful with getting a meaningful story out of in that small a word count. And with 100 words a day used to write them, I should get be able to produce approximately 73 by the end of the year, meaning that maybe I can use some of them for extras in my newsletter…

Speaking of my newsletter, it’s time for my March targets. Like February, I want to get a thing or two added into my daily writing routine that brings me another step closer to whatever I think I need to be doing on a daily basis when writing a story each day. Assembling a daily routine for a newsletter is the next step. A few have been sent out in the past. Nothing consistent. I would like that I could publish something each month. For now (and honestly for the future), I am targeting something like the 15th every month. Kinda-sorta in the middle of each month. I might streamline it to be like the second Friday or something like that so that it comes in the same day of the week, but that will be for when I am closer to ready to (re)launch it. Stay tuned for that!

The last thing I want to get started for and going through March and beyond is a daily habit of revision. There’s a HUGE backlog of projects in need of revising. The goal is to first get to where I get through a couple of pages (roughly 250 to 350 words of writing are in a page) each day with an long-goal of revising 2X the volume I write each day until I am caught up. That’s one of my greatest weaknesses. And with finances being ill-suited to pay for an editor yet, it is an area I must undertake myself.

So the long and short of it is that my writing is going well. Keeping my nose to the grindstone on this one should help make this year a successful year in my writing life—whether or not I see any financial success. I’ll keep writing either way!