I wrote at least 100 words a day for a year

This time last year, I set myself a small challenge. The goal was to write a minimum of 100 words a day on a side project, other than my main book, every single day of the year.

I did it. As you can probably guess, otherwise I wouldn't be blogging about it.

And most of the time, it wasn't too difficult to fit in. 100 words can literally be done in a couple of minutes. You can do it while waiting for a train, or in the queue at the chip shop. 

I wrote my minimum daily 100 in lots of different places, and under lots of different conditions. I tapped it out on my phone, trying not to wake the kids at 11:45pm in our cabin on a Disney Cruise. I typed on my laptop and wrote longhand in notebooks. I wrote in pubs and coffee shops and on trains. I got 100 words a day down in hotel rooms at the Harrogate and Bloody Scotland festivals. I stuck to at least 100 a day through a (thankfully mild) bout with Covid. I even got 100 down on the nightmarish day we moved house. I wrote every day: weekdays and weekends, birthdays, Christmas, Halloween, today. 

Most days, I wrote more than the bare minimum. In fact, the average word count was 198 words. I only aimed for 100, and found that I had exceeded the total almost every day.

The stats

I worked on two projects over the course of the year. I finished the draft of one book (starring a certain recurring character), and started another one (a standalone). I wrote 50,066 words on the former, from January to late September, and 22,207 words on the latter, from late September to today, giving a total of 72,273 words.

That's not a bad total for a year. In fact, it's close to a full book's worth of words. 

But this was just a side project, so it's 72,273 extra words that wouldn't have existed otherwise. I still wrote a full draft of a book as well as that.

Are they good words? Some of them are pretty good, some are total shit: such is the way of first drafts. But I now have a big chunk of words to work with, and hopefully, in 2022, I can develop one or both projects into books people might want to read. 

It's just before 6pm where I am, and 2021 is almost over. Wherever you are, I hope you have an amazing new year and read (and/or write) some good books.

And tomorrow? I'm going to write 100 words.

A 2021 project

Happy New Year! 

I hope you all had a safe and relatively enjoyable one. Fingers crossed the vaccines are rolled out quickly enough for us all to leave the house a little more this year.

I had a reasonably productive 2020, despite everything, and there will be news about my 2021 book soon. It's not out until the autumn, but the Hunted paperback will be out in early March. 

As always, I'll be writing another novel, but this year I'm going to try something new. Inspired by a technique Jenny Blackhurst told me about, I've made a chart of all 365 days in 2021, and I'm going to try to keep an unbroken chain by crossing off a day every time I write at least 100 words on a side project.

What's the side project? I'll tell you on New Year's Eve.

I tried this for a few months last year and it worked pretty well until I got hopelessly stuck, so I think the secret is to plan ahead a little more. It showed me that even small amounts of writing can build up to a lot of words pretty quickly. A bit like a micro-version of my 500 words technique.

Maybe this will be all on one project, maybe it'll be on more than one. The only rule is, I have to do 100 extra words on something that isn't the main book every day, all year.

If you'd like to do this yourself, feel free to download my chart.

All you need to remember is what Fleetwood Mac (and indeed Adrian McKinty) said: 

Never break the chain.