Dean Wesley Smith has taken on an interesting challenge that I will soon take up myself.  He is publicly displaying the amount of writing he does in a given day, with month-to-month totals given for fiction writing and non-fiction writing.

For me this challenge will be to hold myself accountable.  2013 was a productive (If not profitable) year for my writing, and my plan is for 2014 to be at least ten times more productive and, hopefully, profitable.  There are ambitious goals that must be met.

Expect my first post tonight!  I’ll probably break it up into three categories for word count: nonfiction, planning and outlining, fiction writing, and salable words:

• Nonfiction: Posts here or anything else written that pertains to the business of writing, such as correspondence, query letters, submission letters, etc.
• Planning and outlining: anything from simple, jotted-down notes to full-blown outlines.
• Fiction writing: from rough draft to finished product.
• Salable words: the finished product.

I have some numbers from January that I should post up that are pretty interesting.  With the six stories completed in January, the amount of total words written when compared with the amount of finished product was a ratio of roughly 3-to-1.  So, the next time I write out a 5,000 word story I should plan for 15,000 words to be written.

How does it work for you, as a writer?  Can you bang it all out in one go and send it off for acceptance, or do you need to get something – anything – written and then revise and rewrite?