2024 wasn’t the best year for me. I was more productive by the end of the year than I thought was possible. That still doesn’t make it a good year.

Overall, I wrote over 360K words. Considering that I was only planning on 400K, and given how the year turned out, that isn’t bad. It’s actually a lot better than I’d thought.

TLDR version: Wrote a lot during 2024 and am planning on 500K for 2025.

Longer version:

By year end, my word count was 367,515 words. I wrote:

7 short stores

5 novels

In addition, there were:

6349 words of blogging

18785 words in my newsletters

16677 words of Patreon “Peek Behind the Curtain” posts

17082 words for essays

3K in miscellaneous edits

2023, I wrote about 440K words for the year. I did a LOT more essays and more Patreon-specific content. Funnily enough, the amounts for blogging, newsletters, and miscellaneous remained close to the same.

I averaged 30.6K words per month in 2024, which honestly? Isn’t bad. There were months in there where I didn’t write anything at all.

The months when I didn’t have any trips were the months that I wrote the most. I even achieved 50K for two months, October and December. I might have gotten a lot more done in November, however, there was travel (Author Nation) then we were without power for five days.

So why only 500K for the year? That averages to a little more than 40K per month. On months with no travel, I’m doing 42K right now, though I’ve managed 50K a couple of times.

But there will be months with travel next year. (My niece has another surgery, and I’ll be in Portland the last week of January.) Though I’m better, I’m not convinced that I can do 50K per month regularly. (If that changes, I’ll look at my averages come midyear and make adjustments.)

At this point, 500K seems totally doable, without having to push or do something like a marathon, though I’d like to try that again in 2025. (We’ll see—I have other things planned so it might not happen.) Probably 550K would be easy. But holding off on increasing the annual number just yet.

Right now, picking a REALLY EASY word count goal, something that appears very achievable, makes more sense to me. Maybe come 2026 I’ll be able to push again, do something ambitious like 700K, but not yet.

So how about you? What did you achieve in 2024 in terms of writing, and what are you looking to do?