Happy New Year to everyone out there!

This year, the official final word count tally was 1,403,259 words written. That is, by a large margin, the most words I’ve ever written in a calendar year. So what made this year so different, especially with all the health challenges I’d faced?

Part of it was changing my sleep cycle. I used to stay up until midnight or later and get up at seven to get ready for work. Instead, I focused on having two primary writing sessions per weekday–7:00AM-10:00AM, and 9:00PM-11:00PM. That gave me four hours of writing every day. In order to achieve this, I was in bed at 11 every night, and was up ay 5:45AM every weekday. Saturdays are my “ground and pound” days, where I typically just wrote all day unless I had plans. Sundays I’m up at 4:45AM for church (no, that’s not a typo) and write in the afternoons. Since my body needs only about 6 hours of sleep per night, it worked out well.

I also started using dictation software more for outlining and dialogue. Once I grew used to the pacing the software needed, the dictation increased my word count output fivefold. Instead of 2,000 words per day written, I was easily hitting 10,000 words per day written on some days, with 4,000-5,000 words per day on average.

Another trick I learned was to write what I was excited about. That… was a challenge, because there are things I really want to write but I’m contractually obligated to write other things first. However, once I was able to trick my mind into believing that I have to eat the vegetables before I get dessert, progress increased. The idea that I could trick myself makes me laugh now but at the time, it’d felt like some sort of psychological breakthrough in the creative process.

My goal for 2026 is “only” 500,000 words. That 1.4 million is an anomaly, and I’ll probably never do it again. But with seven books on the calendar year needing to be written, I just might do it a second time. I mean, why not? If I can do it once, I can do it twice.

Right?