May turned out to be one of my best months since last summer. I wrote 35,500 words of fiction, which comes to an average of about 1,150 words/day. For me, that is an average of about 45 minutes of writing every day. Only 10 of the 31 days in May were less than 1,000 words. My best day was May 23, when I wrote over 2,800 words. My lowest word count day for the month came on May 25, when I wrote 605 words–and even that came when I was out of town with the family. Here is what May 2014 looked like:

All that said, I still struggled with the novel draft all month long. I restarted the draft 12 times, so that my usable copy for the second draft is far less than the 35,000 words I wrote. I’m still pleased that I pushed through and didn’t allow the difficulties to stop me from writing. I sat at the keyboard every day, whether I was struggling or not, and wrote, trying to produce the best possible story I could manage.

My consecutive-day writing streak remains in tact. As of yesterday (June 1), I have written for 315 consecutive days. 50 more days and I will hit a year without missing a day. All told, I’ve written 458 out of the last 460 days.

I set a new personal record in May as well. My main goal is to write every day without fail, but also without too much concern of how much I write. A secondary goal is to try to get in 500 words/day if I can manage that. During May, I broke my previous record of 33 consecutive days of exceeding that 500 words/day goal. As of yesterday, I’ve now written at least 500 words/day for the last 44 days.

All of this fiction writing has taken some small toll on my blogging. I wrote a total of 19,000 words worth of blog posts in May, and on 5 days in May, I didn’t write any posts at all! If you combine my fiction writing and blogging in May, I wrote of 55,000 words and averaged about 1,700 words/day. Here is what the combined writing looks like:

In June, I’m hoping to overcome the struggles on the novel and press forward. We’ll see how things go.