2024 Writing Recap

We’re almost at the end of the year and I’m done with writing fiction for the year, so now as any time is the time to review my writing this year.

This was a weird year. In an ideal year, I’d work on a draft for a quarter, and then a different draft for another quarter. If I wanted to be really specific, I’d use the four quarters to swap between each draft and have two completed drafts each year.

But unfortunately, I’m stuck in reality and not ideal land. And while I didn’t publish anything this year, I did have two main projects that I worked on this year – Lost in the Canyon and Project Whisper.

I’ve talked about Lost in the Canyon, and that book changed a few different ways – from the location, to the title (the title changed twice actually), and it’s an insane messy first draft that I hope to get back to sometime in 2026.

Because all for 2025 will be focused on the other project with the plans to release it at the end of the year. Project Whisper is my big ten year anniversary project and I can’t wait to start sharing a little bit of information and teasers in the new year.

Lost in the Canyon was my first attempt at a stand-alone in a long time. Being an indie author, so much of indie author strategy to build your sales and your readership is with series. You get people into a world and if you have a good series, you have more fans. More readers.

But I’ve read so many stand-alone books in the last few years, I wanted to write one, too. Just one story, a little twisty, a little spicy, and a nod to Texas and the vast stories that the state has when it comes to true crime.

So, I really want to go back to that book sometime in the new few years, clean it up, and maybe even try to sell it to an agent or a publisher.

We’ll have to see what happens with that in the future.

With that book, Lost in the Canyon, I had my one 10,000 word day this year. I really want to have more than one next year, but even just one, I’m grateful for.

I had my biggest writing month with Project Whisper in September when I had 45,000 words in a month. And then dove right off the cliff into burnout and it took three months to finish the draft, whoops.

I lost track of how many words I wrote this year, whoops, but I do think it was about 190,000 words, if I had to guess.

I don’t know, but even when the year was tough, there were still a few highlights in writing life.