Well all, the middle of an amazingly cold and bleak February is upon us, and I suppose I’m pleased to report that I’ve gone over some two hundred thousand words in my planned trilogy. For me, that’s a lot of writing. Generally spoken one of my novels is about 90k, so this means that I’m about 20-30k into Book Three of this unpublished trilogy.

A good start, 20 or 30k. It’s enough to give you the idea that you’re stuck into a book pretty well, that you’re not screwing around. My final target for the series is about 270k, I think I’ll probably come up a couple of thousand short, but not by a crazy amount.

As you all know, writing is my bulwark against the black dogs of winter. The more I write, the better I feel.

Funny how before my fortieth birthday the only thing I ever wrote were papers at college and military reports. Now I can’t imagine not having this gift during my unplanned early retirement.

Let’s add it up, I’ve never done this before.

My original trilogy. ~270k.

Second trilogy. ~200k to date.

Numbered book. ~56k

Origin. ~36k

Unpublished novellas. ~111k

Fanfic, odd jobs, etc. ~30k

And I’m sure there’s stuff I’m forgetting. However, let’s bust out my computer’s calculator. 703k words, approximately.

Whoa. That’s a lot of writing, especially for an unemployed ex-soldier. This represents seven winter’s outputs- it looks as if I’ve kicked out about 100k words each black season since 2014. I hadn’t realized it was so much until just now; plus, each year for the past four I’ve typed about 50k words onto this website. So heap another 200k words onto my total.

That’s well over 900k words since I was put out to pasture by the Army.

I anticipate that by COB 2021 that I will exceed 1,000k words.

One Million Words.

How did this happen?

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t unpleasant. It’s simply surprising, like watching an odometer roll onto 111,111.1 miles or something.

Freakish.