It’s January 17th, 2015. I have been hard at work for over two weeks now on my 1K a Day Challenge and it’s time for another update.

I am pleased to announce that Days 11 through 17 have been successes, with a minimum of 1,000 words per day written. I’ve been sick with flu-like symptoms (that have thankfully yet to progress to real flu) for the past couple days, but I managed to come through it without missing a day, despite really wishing to. More on that in the 1K a Day motivational series next Wednesday.

So my stats for Days 11 through 17 are as follows:

Day 11 –  1,119 words
Day 12 –  2,567 words
Day 13 –  1,102 words
Day 14 –  1,736 words
Day 15 –  2,146 words
Day 16 –  6274 words
Day 17 –  1250 words

Total count for the year thus far is 31,739 words. Average daily word count is 1,867 words. The novel I’m working on is at 29,964 words. Based on my projections for the story, it is 15% finished.

It is worth noting that Day 16 (6274 words) was all writing specifically for the short story I posted last night. I’d like to write one short story a month at a minimum, so using 12 of my days for that throughout the year feels pretty sufficient.

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Now that I am deeper into the story and feel reasonably sure I’ll finish the first draft, I feel comfortable talking a little about it.

Its working title is Gridfall. The concept was to be a collaborative effort with me at its head (at least in the planning and running stages) back in 2009 when it was first conceived, called a Creative Writing Story, or CWS for short. I had been involved in one before (CWS3, which we did eventually finish in 2008), and was impressed by the work put into the CWS2 (which sadly never made it past the initial ‘open to collaboration’ phase). We brainstormed the CWS4 over a couple weeks and came up with some key characters and some vague ideas of overarching plot, and then I wrote what was to be the first chapter in the story. The whole thing fell apart at that stage and the collaborative effort never got off the ground. Mostly my fault as I lost interest and became very busy once I started working again, effectively killing my own motivation.

That first chapter was the 4,000 words I had at the start of this endeavor on January 1st. The core element of the three main characters and the way the story begins remained the same, while I drastically revised the plot going forward. It was to have a bit of a Steampunk feel, borrowing elements from games like Valkyria Chronicles. That is no longer the route.

If you were to ask me what genre the story is in, I’d tell you “alternate industrial, near-futuristic, post-apocalyptic fantasy”. Which is to say that the technology is beyond our own real-world tech, gotten to from a different industrial revolution path, in a fictional world setting, after a technological and social collapse.

Sound confusing? I have no idea how to market this story.

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And remember, writing is a skill. So write the hell on, writers.