One Million Words

For those of you that don't know I've been participating in a 12in12 Challenge. Basically this means I was to write 12 novellas (20,000-40,000) words a month for 12 months. I started in December of 2011 and will finish November 30th, 2012. This is the second reason why NaNo is so big for me this year. The first reason is because hey, it's National Novel Writing Month and that in itself is important.

Anyway, the third reason NaNo2012 is so important is that half-way through the year I took it upon myself to take on another challenge: 1 million words in a year. Yes, I decided I was going to write 1 million words between December 2011 and November 2012.

The forth reason has two parts: 1) I want to hit 200,000 words and 2) I've been sitting on this idea for a full year. That's right. I've had the idea for this year's NaNo since last year's NaNo. More on that in some other post.

But let's get back to reason number three: Writing 1 million words in a year. A lot of people (authors and non-authors) have said that it takes a writer 1 million words to become worthy of the title of 'writer'. Well, here are my stats for the year:

December: 22,000
January: 20,000
Februrary: 48,615
March: 147,543
April: 63,380
May: 96,948
June: 80,019
July: 134,023
August: 183,562
September:117,782
October:84,964
Total so far:998,836

This leaves me with 1,164 to write in order to hit 1,000,000 words this year. I will have completed my goal by the time this blog has been posted. Will finishing my million early stop me from writing 200,000 for NaNo2012? Nope. I'm still going to go for 200,000 words in November. Why? Well, I'm crazy. I think we've established that, right?

It's been one heck of a journey, I'll tell you that. Those million words took up six books, multiple shorts stories and a few novellas. If you're so inclined, you can buy the novella through Smashwords, Nook or Kobo. The others aren't done yet and the novel edits take time.

I'll probably talk about the six novels in a seperate blog post because hey, they're part of the journey to 1 million. I do want to mention that this has been the first time I've counted my words. This just proves I'm crazy but I'm okay with that. Until next time: Good bye, good night and don't let any demons steal your soul.