Since it is February, and I’ve had a good month of writing in January, I thought it was time I did an update post and let you all know how things are going.

After December when I only wrote 3,000 words, I was ready to dive back in and really get to work. All three of my stories: Finding Joy, Dylan’s Story, and Hymns in the Hills were calling me. What to work on first? I figured that since Finding Joy was so close to the end (my goal was 60k words) I would start with that. Besides, I really wanted to get it finished.

The first week I managed to get 5k written in spite of having a bad cough and cold the first part of the week. It was fun to see the progress, but I realized that this story wasn’t going to be only 60k words long. Nope. It was headed for something longer. So I moved my goal to 70k.

The second week I set a goal of writing 6k. I reached it even though I missed one night of writing because I was working in the church nursery on Wednesday. I also sat down and jotted all the things that still had to happen in the story before it could get finished. I wanted to get this story written by the end of the month.

The 3rd week my goal was 7k. I started out strong with 2,032 words on Monday. Since I could write every night, I was hoping I could get a little more than 7k written. Well, I did. I ended up with 8,619 words written. And once again I bumped up my final word count on the Home page progress bar. This time to 80k.

The last full week of January was a busy one. I worked in the nursery again on Wednesday, attended a musical concert on Thursday and was having a bit of trouble with my story anyway. But, in spite of that, I managed to get 6,600 words written. But not all on Finding Joy. You see, something happened. Something that almost never happens with me and my stories.

I went to write Friday afternoon and spent at least 10 minutes trying to convince myself to get to writing. I didn’t want to! I wanted to toss all 70k+ words in the trash and forget the entire thing. Something was off on the story and I didn’t know what. Ugh! So, my mom and sister said, “Well, just write something else.” (Don’t you just love family critics?) So I did. And got 1,000 words written. On Saturday I didn’t even try to write Finding Joy. Instead I wrote 1,600 words of a short story.

So much for getting Finding Joy written this month. Oh, well. And no, I didn’t throw it away. I’m going to wait until my editor has read what I’ve written and then go and read the entire thing and see if I can find where I got off track. But until then, I’ll focus on other stories and novels.

Last week was not a good writing week. Oh, I had time, I just didn’t have a story. I finished one short story, did some “leg work” on Hymns in the Hills, and tried starting another short story. But that story isn’t quite what I wanted. So . . . I really hope this week will be better.

And this post doesn’t include all the emails I’ve written, the blog posts I’ve done, the book reviews I’ve posted, and anything else.

What about you? Have you been doing much writing, editing or both? I’d love to hear about your current project. Leave me a comment and let me know.

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