63,000 Words this Month

I finished my fifth assignment for my mentorship program last night. It ended up being a story about a woman hiding behind the counter of a coffee shop. She’s hiding behind the counter because somebody has come in with a gun. It ended up being a very fun story to write in a good challenge. The story ended up being about 3225 words long and took me about four or five hours to write with breaks.

I ended up going to bed sometime around 4 AM. It took a few hours longer to write it than I would’ve liked but I was enjoying myself the entire time and only suffered the next day from exhaustion. I was up at 10:30 AM, when my wife brought me breakfast in bed. So only about six hours sleep. Getting woken up with breakfast in bed isn’t such a bad way to start Saturday.

After that we had to clean the house as we had guests coming for the evening. It was in celebration of my wife’s birthday. I made spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread for everyone as well as cake for dessert.

It was nice to see everybody and have a nice quiet evening. My stepdaughter also had three other friends over who seemed to enjoy the spaghetti as well. Being newly graduated students, a free meal is always welcome.

Today, being January 31st,  marks the final day for this month’s 2026 words per day in 2026. By the end of this evening, I should have written just about 63,000 words from January. That represents 1/3 more words than I wrote all of 2025. And just about 40% of what I wrote in 2024. Not bad for a month’s work.

I’m looking forward to starting February with a clean slate. It will be nice to only have to write just over 2000 words per day as opposed to the nearly 3000 words per day I had to write at the end of this month every day.

I’m still trying out dictating. Mostly I’m doing it for this blog to get my practice in. Last night writing my assignment story I chose to use my keyboard for the whole process. I didn’t want to taint my mentor’s reaction to my story by adding an additional parameter.

But using this method for my blog is teaching me the speed at which I can speak and what words I need to pronounce more clearly for the computer to understand me. Like all things there is a learning curve, and it gets easier every day.

I have been able to get to my reading couple days in a row now. This means I haven’t been able to maintain a streak for that. This is what happens when I get too busy and if I stay up too late working. Nonetheless I’m going to take a moment and enjoy the fact that I achieved the month of January’s challenge of writing every day. It really gives me hope for the future and gets me excited about what’s next. Small achievements give me the stamina to keep going.

This morning while we were having breakfast in bed, we watched a documentary series on Rembrandt on Prime. The show offered a lot of interesting insights about him that I was not aware of. Like the fact that he died penniless and that when his wife passed, he could not remarry since his marriage contract stipulated that his son would get half of the estate what his wife passed. Therefore, if he were to remarry it would bankrupt him.

We will probably continue to watch this series tomorrow as I plan to take a bit of an easier day tomorrow. Part of that will be getting my writing done before 8 PM comes round so that I can go to bed at a decent hour. I’m currently writing this blog at 1 AM a few hours after my guests have left.

I think this February, in order to keep meeting my word goal deadlines, I’ll need to start writing a novel. This will give me something to work on everyday reimagining storylines and characters from scratch. I still plan to write some short stories in between days where I don’t feel like continuing the novel. I’ll still need to write some stories for my mentor that she gives me assignments. These tend to be very enjoyable to do, and I think will be nice breaks from a longer novel.

I just received notification this evening that my BYOK writing device has finally shipped. Which is just-in-time as I will have use for it as I travelled to work on the train starting two weeks from now. It’s a small profile design and long-life battery should prove useful. But I’ll talk more about that after I get my hands on a unit.

Time to go write some stories.