I Will Write 500 words, and I will Write 500 More: 6

How did you get on with your writing goals in May?

I achieved a total of words 12,402 and wrote on 13 days. For days I did write on I averaged words per day. for the full month the average drops to words per day.
On four days I achieved 1000+ words. one of those was over 2k, the other was 3.7k

If I didn't write another thing this year my average daily word count for the year would be still be 182.

Over the month I posted 21 times to Hive and these were a mix of stories, prompt responses, articles, and blog posts about events.

I'm disappointed to miss my 500 words per day target but I ran into a mental wall and even prompts couldn't get me moving forward.

The main problem is exhaustion. I've been working extra as I'd agreed to be cover for people on vacation and the toll on my ME/CFS is significant. The one thing which can slide is my writing, well, that and engagement here.

And my engagement has dropped. I've hardly been on @dreemport this month. I'm just about managing to keep up with responses to people commenting on my posts.

Will June be better? It should start to be from the second week, but we'll have to see.

Elsewhere in the month I got a good bump on building the shed which will become my garden office and yesterday collected free materials which will become the roof.

I also got our bed to a state where it can be used, though there are a couple of details I need time to finish.

And I managed to list some items on eBay. For the month I'm on sales of £78.39, which is tiny, but better than nothing. Like everything it is going to take time to ramp things up and my plan of listing 5 things a week isn't even happening. But any sales are good. You can keep an eye out for items available here.

Going back to my writing I'm working hard on Chapter 3 of my LA Noir story and it's been tough. I got about 1,500 words done, then realised I'd completely missed a plot point I need in this chapter. Re-writing it has collided hard with my exhaustion issues.

Currently I'm posting a romance novellete in @hive-199275, and going over it for the purpose of breaking it down was a fun exercise. Part of the fun was re-reading it and feeling joy at what I'd written. It's not perfect by any means, another round of editing is on the list of things to do. Still, it's a genre I don't write in generally. But, sometimes, a story wants to tell itself and this was one such. It took a long time to come together and was trunked for a good spell due to feedback from one critique group I was with for a spell.

It took time to realise that the issues the group had was due to their not being familiar with Romance tropes, and reading it as an IRL story. There are things which happen in SF or Fantasy stories - which is my normal playground - which are outwith IRL, obviously. I didn't expect to need to explain Romance is the same.

As of today I have 600.395 Hive (up 199.37). Of this 451.412 is delegated out. It was recommended to me that instead of delegating out I build up my own holdings, which will give me more clout on posts. So my aim is to get up to 1k before I start delegating. I'll make an exception for any folks I help onboard, or who I know who onboard.

I have 145.14 HBD (up 65.555), which is all in savings. At 20% APR why wouldn't I?

How did you do with your plans in May? What are you hoping for June?

Drop a message below and let us know.

Some will know The Proclaimers song I’m Gonna Be (500 miles). Well, it’s still the theme for this writing year: ‘and I will write 500 words, and I will write 500 more’.

words by stuartcturnbull, art by JonHoefer on Pixabay