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I wrote over 400,000 words in 2024. I published over 20,000 words in 2024.  10,639 words of that was a novelette that appeared in the 100th anniversary of “Weird Tales” magazine. Thanks to Jonathan Maberry who edited it and put my name on the cover right between H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, two of my early influences as a writer. Reading Howard’s short story collection, Pigeons from Hell, when I was fourteen was what made me finally decide that not only did I want to be a writer, but I wanted to write fantasy, horror, science fiction, and sword & sorcery.  If you want to read my story, “Cupid is a Knavish Lad,” where Anita Blake tries to save a woman from a vampire that is breaking all the rules and the law, and other great stories you can order it online. 10,887 words went to a second novelette in the anthology, Down these Mean Streets edited by Larry Correia and Kacey Ezell. It’s full of wonderful stories including mine, “It’s Always Sunny in Key West.” Visit Key West, Florida in Anita’s world where we meet a new vampire, Sunny Winston. Though you’ll see him with more than one last name in the story because even though vampires are legal now, he and his friends are playing it cautious, just in case the law changes back. I enjoyed writing Sunny so much that I’m making plans to explore other cities and their vampires in other stories. But where did all the rest of those words go? 200,000 went into the new Merry Gentry novel. Yes, that’s right the 10th Merry Gentry novel is done and off to my editor in New York. Thanks to all you fans that have been so patient waiting for me to finish Merry’s adventures. It’s coming at last.

Now for all of you doing the math, that leaves me with 200,000 words unaccounted for, so where did that go? It’s the outtakes file for the Merry Gentry book. You read that right. I cut as many words as I wrote for this book. I didn’t realize it until minutes ago when I was putting this blog together. All I remembered was that writing this book was one of the hardest I’ve ever done. I thought this book would never be finished. I beat myself up a lot. Why couldn’t I finish this book? What was wrong with me? What was wrong was I wrote a huge, freaking, enormous book, then edited and edited it, and cut here and there until it was done. And done meant I wrote 400,000 words from May 2023 to December 2024. So a year and a half… so not in one year. (Yes, my mind went straight to discounting it as not as amazing because it was a year and a half and not just a year. I’m aware that’s a bit crazy. Welcome to the impossible standards inside my head.) It still sounds impossible to write all that in that short a time, doesn’t it? I mean it sounds impossible to me and I did it. No wonder I thought I was losing my mind writing this book. Merry always writes hard for me, but this was epic, or maybe epic battle. I had convinced myself that I was weak and had been a big baby and that I’d only written 100,000 words or 100,050 tops. The book alone is 200,000 words and that’s just what my editor has on her desk. That I discounted so much of my hard work and just let my perfectionism and puritanical punishing interior dialogue make me unable to see all my accomplishment is something I’ll be discussing with my therapist later, but for right now I’m just going to try and let myself appreciate how much I actually did in a year and a half.