Those of you who follow me on social media may have seen that I just finished participating in a replacement for Nanowrimo, called Writing Month. I did this in no small part because I was anxious to try to write again, but also, I’d been very disgruntled with recent news about Nanowrimo going all in on AI.

Writing Month emerged as a very early stage competitor to Nanowrimo, and I wanted to support that. I was particularly interested in how they were going for having a very customizable kind of a writing goal–not just the 50,000 words in a month that Nanowrimo is famous for. And also not just locking you in to November.

So I chose a small goal: 6,000 words for the month, with the hope of finishing off one of my long-paused works in progress. I chose the novella Daughter of the Hammer, which is set in the Rebels of Adalonia universe, since I’d written a fair amount on that already and a small goal made it feasible to possibly finish it off.

I am very pleased to report that I hit that goal and passed it, clocking in 7,067 words for the month. Daughter of the Hammer is not yet done, but it is very close to being so. I’m pretty sure I’m in the second to last scene in it, so that’s maybe another 1-2 thousand words.

I pulled this off by setting myself a daily writing goal of 200 words, to try and gently rev my writing engine and remind it of what it feels like to write a little bit every day. I’m going to try to keep this momentum going in December, until I can finish the story.

Then comes followup goals: getting it beta read and edited, and finding it some cover art. I’m going to be putting out feelers on social media for quotes on editing rates and cover art commissions, with a possible goal of setting up a crowd fund to cover the expense of doing that. So keep an eye on my social media feeds, as well as on this site, for further bulletins on this as events warrant!