The first month of 2025 is already gone, and we’re once again at the first Wednesday of the month with Insecure Writer’s Support Group. I had to laugh because I looked up the question of the month and it seems like it was written especially for me.

IWSG Question of the Month – Is there a story or book you’ve written you want to/wish you could go back and change?

If you’ve interacted with me at all in the past few months, you know I’m rewriting book 1. You also know I’m not making as much progress as I want. I’ve been plugging along, streamlining events, showing more, telling less. I’m currently 25K in, which sounds great. Except this book is 170K long. Yes, I’ve cut a lot in my planned rewrite, but I write longer, deeper scenes now so I’m expecting it to come out around the same length. It’s already 4K longer compared to the same point in the plot in the old version.

So I did the math. I have 150K to go, and I want to finish this year. That’s 455 words per day. Doable, except there are several days I don’t get to write. Between juggling my job, my kids, their homework, my exercise, cooking dinner, reading with my son, not ignoring my husband, and trying to get enough sleep to be a functional person… I’m left with a 1 hour lunch with which I can choose 1 of 4 activities: writing, critiquing, responding to messages, or working on art while consuming an audiobook. Writing doesn’t always win. On the weekends, I spend a full day taking care of necessary tasks like laundry, house cleaning, grocery shopping, and catching up on all the things I put off during the week due to no time. Sometimes I do have one day left to do some writing, but that isn’t every week.

Therefore, 455 words per day isn’t achievable for me. (That’s my unfortunate realization.)

However, I’m not one of those who subscribes to the “must write every day to be considered a real writer” mentality. Words a week is a better target: 3200, rounding up. That’s still leaps above my recent progress, which *looks at yWriter* was 4700 words in the past 2 months. *sigh* At my current rate, it’d take me 6 years to finish. After taking 10 years on book 2, that’s too long.

I want to finish this book this year. And according to the numbers, I need to up my output to achieve that. And I will, after I show you all the pictures I’ve been working on lately. These are environments from my world, each their own province:

I find I don’t have a passion for environments like I do my characters. But it was a fun experiment visually diving into other areas of my world.

Have you ever done the math to figure out how much is needed to finish one of your works within a year? Do you like environment art? Do you have trouble juggling everything like I do?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.