Well, once again it is the time of year when I’d like to post up how my writing progress has gone for the year (and, if you’re curious, you can compare this year’s progress update with last year’s here).

Progress updates are a funny thing.  They imply a need for quantifiable achievement, and it is definitely true that I do like to tabulate things, probably more than other people would consider healthy (hence, the bottom of this post with my excel-generated word-count plot).  However, the flip side is that tabulating up what I’ve done for the year gives me a chance to notice that, even though my progress always feels so slow, I have made progress, and it’s worth celebrating.

Last year I organized this post around the different ‘realms’ my writing efforts fall into, and I’ll do that again below.

First, though, I’d like to call out two kinds of writing progress I made this year that would be really easy to call “progress” in air quotes, but that are each, in their way, a meaningful part of the process, and that I need to remind myself I’m happy I achieved them.

1. Revisions:

I ran polish-revisions on not one, but two of my SSCS’s this year, the stories that I’ll publish in installments on this blog in 2025 and 2026.  Although I intentionally keep revisions light for my SSCS’s, both of these stories needed a careful look and tweaks to make sure that the final story that came out in the end was both self-consistent and accessible, and tiny, paragraph-level tweaks can actually make a huge difference in terms of bringing a reader into a story.  Also…I have a tendency completely skip figuring out the names for things in my first drafts, and one of those two stories needed a serious sit-down to sort out the names of things.

Aside from the SSCS’s, this year I’ve also started to wade into the first real round of revisions for my Big Story #2, where right now I’m at the stage where I take a clear look at what I’ve got, realize that it looks about as appetizing as a mashed up bowl of wet cat food, and now need to work some serious outline-fu to sort out what should actually go where and what needs to be taken away or added to turn this mess into a coherent, enjoyable story.  (This is why, for my SSCS’s, I promise my brain I’m only allowed very light revisions on those stories—it would turn intense and scary otherwise.)

2. Icon Images:

You’ve seen some of the icon images I use for my stories already.  I included the relevant ones that I had available in last year’s progress post, and I include the given story’s icon image each time I post an installment for one of my SSCS’s.  This year, I worked on making (slightly more polished) versions of four more, which you can see below (including the one for 2025’s SSCS, shhhh).

Like so many art projects, these are pretty time-consuming without necessarily producing anything anybody else will be much impressed with or care about.  But, they’re art projects that are linked to my stories, or to my ideas for stories that are trying to become, and for me they make those stories much more tangible in ways that I can’t quite manage with just words alone.  They’re little, mini-universes all their own, and for that reason they’re precious to me.

One of those icon images is for a story I haven’t started writing yet, in a brand-new story realm.  Maybe I won’t manage to turn it into real story, but maybe I will, so I’m including it in my list of realms for writing progress below.

Story Realm of-the-Hour: Multi-piece-story maybe-#1

So, once again, I’m talking about story stuff without giving anything even vaguely resembling a title.  But, with nothing even written yet, I think that’s definitely allowed in this case.  My story ideas come in a lot of different shapes, and this one is in the shape of lots-of-separate-stories-set-in-the-same-world-and-maybe-with-the-same-character.  So, if this goes, eventually I’ll need a title both for the initial story in my head, and for the series as a whole (and titles are hard, don’t you know!).

I will say that, as you might guess from the icon image here, the first story in this Realm is meant to involve elephants.  It’s also set in an alternative present-day/near-future, which is a scary proposition for me.  The beauty of writing fantasy is that I get to make things up and nobody can definitely say that I got it wrong.  But this story needs to feel like it could be real, it needs for the reader (for me, really) to be forced to think, ‘What would I do in this situation, with the resources that actually are or are not at my disposal?’  I hope I get there.  I really want to know what some of the answers are.

Completed so far:  icon image!
Still needs:  to be written at all
Progress in 2024:  Some world-building and research-reading

Next Realm: Big Story #1 – The Dark Queen’s Reign

That’s the series title there, not a book title, though it’s more than I listed for this Realm last year.  But this year, perhaps you noticed, I actually published a fragment of one of the ancillary short stories from Big Story #1 in the blog post I put up on Halloween.  The story that fragment comes from is called either ‘Ghost Boots’ or ‘A Ghost on the River’ (I’ve never entirely been able to pick one title over the other), and follows my favorite secondary character from the main story line.  Now that I’ve got something published from this writing realm, I should probably stop calling it just ‘Big Story #1’.  So, now you know.  It’s: The Dark Queen’s Reign.

…In terms of actual writing in this realm, I really do need to get working on Book 3 sometime (darn trilogies).  But, I didn’t do that this year.

Completed so far:  2 books & 3 ancillary short stories, as yet (mostly) unpublished
Still needs: final book & 1-2 more ancillary short stories
Progress in 2024:  None.  Still trying to focus on Big Story #2

Next Realm: Big Story #2

I would love to be able to tease with something actually resembling a title for this one, but the biggest problem there is that I cannot come up with one.  (Actually, the shorthand one I use in my head probably sounds like a reasonable title, especially for a placeholder, but it is not acceptable for reasons!)

My hope had been to make lots of great progress on this story this year.  Unfortunately, as noted above, I got just far enough further along to realize that the current draft is severely structurally flawed.  Which is irksome.  Paired with Big Story #1 it seems to establish a very annoying pattern, which goes something like this: 1) Anna comes up with a Big Story Idea; 2) Anna comes up with lots of world-building and character details and churns out lots of story words; 3) Anna realizes that this story does not fit in one book, and that even though she’s only part-way through, it’s time to stop and re-assess.  4) Anna proceeds to spend so much more time than ‘budgeted’ on revisions.  Some consolation, though: Anna is weird and kind of like revisions, so…hopefully my writing tasks for 2025 will turn out to be…fun?

Completed so far:  first (very rough) draft of book 1 done; now under major structural revisions.
Still needs:  for me to prove to myself I can carve out part of this story into a book shape. (If the current carving size is accurate (hah!) then everything in my head now adds up to about four books…)
Progress in 2024:  6800 words as of this posting (sigh).  But those words were all in what I now realize will have to be Book 2, so it’s less confusing now why I was having momentum issues.

Next Realm: Small-stories Assortment #1 – Wildflowers

Okay, so as a name for a themed assortment of short-stories, Wildflowers probably sounds a bit tepid.  But, dang it, it’s apt.  These are all stories that use some sort of flower as my starting point for brain-storming and as a pillar element within the story itself.

I didn’t add to them this year, but I did come up with that collection title, and made the pretty icon image here, which is for the first story in the Wildflowers Assortment.  (Can you guess the flower?

Completed so far:  3 completely independent, and as yet unpublished, short stories
Still needs:  The next one—always the next one, whenever that shall be.
Progress in 2024:  None.  (except icon image for story #1!)

Next Realm: Serial Stream-of-Consciousness Stories (Small-stories Assortment #2)

This year this was the writing realm that I actually managed to put the most oomph into.  Partly that was because last year I had only managed 17 SSCS installments total and I wanted to catch up a little.  (Yes, that’s a ridiculous sentiment for a writing series that’s supposed be about just having fun—hush.)  Partly it was because, each being smaller, I was actually able to see progress with these stories as I wrote on them, and that was really nice (and it made them more fun).  I hope I don’t go quite so overboard with them next year…but momentum is really nice.

And, of course, SSCS-02, about Mina and her Kraken-dodging adventures, was published to my blog this year, again in weekly installments, and SSCS-03, all its own thing, will be going up starting the first Friday in January 2025—I’m looking forward to being able to show this one off!

Completed so far:  4 independent short stories made up of serialized installments
Published so far:  2 published, both on my blog
Still needs:  1 more serialized short story just drafted and in need of a quick, final polish, hopefully many more to come.
Progress in 2024:  As of this posting, wrote 40 installments (adding up to over 32,000 words)

Final Realm: Blog Posts

For my non-fiction writing (that sounds fancy, yes?) I didn’t do quite as many blog posts this year as last year…and yet they still added up to a suspiciously similar word-count.  Go consistency, I guess?  I don’t think writing these posts was noticeably easier this year than last, but I am sorting out the rhythm for it a little better.  I definitely still have lots to learn when it comes to this writing Realm, and as always, we’ll see how things go next year!

Progress in 2024:  As of (and including) this post, 21 regular-post posts (adding up to 26,000 words) + 49 weekly garden posts (for an additional 6700 words).

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Grand-Total Net Word-count for 2024

Combining fiction and non-fiction, long-form and short-form: 72,000 words.  Which, of course, I’m always going to wish for more.  But still, once again:  Go me.  I wrote words.