What I Wrote In March 2020

Hello!

Before I go on, I want to make an announcement: April is the month of the castle tour! I’ve been researching and prepping a few posts in my spare time over the last month, so you’re going to see more from me in April: of course there’ll be the usual Saturday blog posts, but on top of that, every Wednesday there’ll be a new, in-depth article looking at a British castle. Full details in this post here.

It’s gonna be a big month! I hope to see you there.

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And now to the important stuff: this is what I wrote in March.

Let me just find my word tracker for this month. I swear I left it lying around here somewhere.

So this month was a massive improvement over February. Not to say February was a failure, but… I didn’t write on 15 of February’s 29 days. That means I had more days not writing than actually writing. Not brill.

By comparison, March was off to a roaring start.

And then the Big Bad happened. I’m sure you’ve heard of it by now. It begins with a C and ends with an awful lot of coughing.

Man, just look how beautifully consistent those first two weeks were before all that happened.

It did make me more anxious, the virus, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: February was even worse for me than March has been. February was a month of intense personal stress and crisis. March has been a month of intense stress and crisis for the whole world, but for me personally, things have actually been alright. We got a puppy, for one! And he’s wonderful. He’s got me outside a lot more. (In the garden, obviously.)

I was a little stressed when the lockdown was imposed here in the UK, hence those couple of days around the 20th where I just wrote nothing. That was also when we got the puppy, by the way, and he was a handful. But to be honest, the first week of lockdown went by in a flash and I’m not all that bothered by it now. It hasn’t upset my routine all that much. Like I said, much better than February, so I’m making progress.

So what writing did I actually do this month?

To be honest, a lot of it was for the blog – future blog posts which are now queued up, especially the castle posts (though not all of them are done yet.) I think I wrote a short story at the start of the month but honestly, with all the crap that’s been happening, I’ve forgotten. This month really does feel like it’s lasted a year, doesn’t it?

Then I started a new fantasy project. This is the one I’m hoping to finish over the course of Camp NaNoWriMo (a month-long writing event in April). Follow my Twitter if you’re interested in that, since I’ll be doing updates over there. I’m already at 18,000 words on this project, codenamed ‘Giant and Friend’. So hopefully I should have it done by the end of April!

The chart might look neat and consistent, but my writing schedule certainly hasn’t been. Some days I’ve done 1000 words before midday, other days I’m up after midnight desperately tapping away to hit my deadline.

The only thing that’s kept me on track this month has been grit. Just opening the laptop and throwing some words down even if I feel like crap or I really, really don’t feel inspired to do it. Write anyway, that’s how we get where we want to be. Good luck.

With that in mind, I want to talk about a little challenge I set for myself at the start of the month. Because February had been so sporadic, I wanted to get myself writing more consistently. So I said I’d write at least 1000 words a day, Monday to Friday, like writing was my real job. That’s 5000 words a week.

Now, I didn’t follow this exactly, but I managed to beat my overall weekly word count most of the time. I also found that I don’t need a full weekend off: by the time Saturday was over, most of the time I was raring to go with new ideas so I just went straight back to writing again on Sunday. Crucially, my writing was much more consistent – and I did a lot more of it – than last month, so I’m getting there, at least.

Total words written: 28,442