Most of 2016, this blog was silent. For those who aren’t aware of the reason why, I put my life on stop to care for my mother as she fought her final battle against terminal breast cancer. It was a savage privilege to be there for her final days. But in the same time, it was paralyzing as a creative. It was so dark, it would have absolutely contaminated any of the work I was involved in. So I froze every project.

I did not put fingers to keyboard in 2016 again according to my notes until mid-June, about two weeks after my mother’s passing. I started again on what would be the final draft of what would be the final draft of Triangle: Wildcard, having rethought my approach to that novel, and moved on from there.

The thing it, as a writer, I’ve tried to always to put between 2,000 and 3,000 words into a document per day. They might be usable, they might not. But the idea is you build a habit. Three thousand words per day translated to roughly 100,000 in a year –  another good sized novel.

I guess I was busier, though. I use Grammarly, a program which checks my work on the fly (highly recommended for any other writer out there), and, well, they came up with a slightly higher number:

Just under two million words? Admittedly, some are duplicates, even if I only created only a quarter of those – that’s 500,000 words – in basically six months.

I actually had a productive year, creativity wise, despite the way it started. Who knew?