Here are the writing stats for Sprig at the end of September 2019. To see my progress in other months click here.

This Month

• Words Written: 11,657
• Words Published: 14,991
• Chapters Written: 5
• Chapters Published: 6
• Last Published Chapter: 4.2 Entangled
• Last Completed Chapter: 6.1

Total

• Words Written: 80,777
• Words Published: 55,481
• Chapters Written: 36
• Chapters Published: 24
• Backlogged Chapters: 12

Notes

Well, September was a rough month. I got pretty sick at the beginning of the month and had a hard time getting my words in. On top of that, my kids started waking up earlier, eating into my 5 AM writing time. I am also now writing parts of the story that I hadn't planned as well as the beginning, so it takes more time to figure out what I want to write each day. All of that is to say, I fell behind some this month.

All in all, it wasn't a terrible month. It's not my lowest word count ever, and I only really lost one chapter off of my backlog, leaving me 12 chapters ahead of what's published. If I did this every month, it would be a year before my backlog ran out, so losing a single chapter is not the end of the world. I don't plan on continuing this trend if I can help it, but still, it could be worse.

I actually expected my word count to be lower than it was. I think the main thing that helped me keep my word count up was increasing my daily word count goal. Previously it was 600 words per day. Since I skip a day to edit once every five days, that leaves me 24 days of writing. So, with the goal of 600 words, it would have put me at 14,400 words in a month. As you can see in previous months, I haven't hit that, but the goal gives me something to push toward (and last month I got pretty close).

This month, I upped my goal to 700 words per day, which makes my monthly goal 16,800. Again, I didn't reach it but having that higher daily goal really kept my word count climbing when I was feeling okay and had time to write. So, the lesson of the month is: Use daily goals.

I'm hoping to figure out some kind of solution to keep my word count up in the future months because the last thing I want to do is slow down my release schedule. If you do enjoy the story, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Most support tiers give you early access to chapters and they help get me closer to working less at my day job and spending more time on this story. Thanks for reading! Hopefully, October's progress update is better than this one!

How to read the graphs: Lines of the same color should be compared—blue is for words, green is for chapters. Solid lines are what has been written and dotted are what was published. Generally, we want dotted and solid lines of the same color to be either the same or we want solid lines higher.