101,203 Short

This is not fiction.

I had a target in 2024 to write 1,000,000 words for the year. That’s 2,740 words per day every day on average. It’s a hard thing to do and it was the challenge for the year because it was hard.

I did not hit the target. I came in, as per the title, 101,203 words short of the target. I adjusted expectations down towards the tail end of the year and started to aim for 900,000. Even there I was 1,103 words short. I landed at 898,897 words in total for the year.

Which, to be clear, is still a lot. 2,456 words per day every day for the year on average which takes like ninety minutes at a breakneck, free-writing sort of pace but I’m happy with a more meandering sort of pace generally.

But it’s true that the days where I really just smack out thousands of words with a bit of focus are the days where I’m out of the house with a drink of either coffee or beer or red wine. It’s usually beer, to be honest, at mostly Milton Common here or Scratch here in Milton in Brisbane along the street on which my building faces Suncorp Stadium. So I associate this process in good volume a bit too much with alcohol but the takeaway from 2025 is:

It’s easier to focus when I’m away physically from distractions.

Of course I learned a lot else. As you do. I’ll unpack that in private, I think.

As for what else I’m proud of in 2024… In no particular order except the way they’re coming to me we have:

• Ran a homemade Brisbane Marathon on December 22nd, 2024. Medals have been ordered and they’re on the way. There was talk during the slower, walking parts right at the tail end of the marathon where we talked about maybe just getting, like, random athletics carnival medals from op shops but I just grabbed some cheap ones for Sean and I that will arrive some time after January 10th.
  
• Did some record revenue numbers at TradeMutt, my day job. Here, I sell conversation starting work shirts by tradies for tradies as the Marketing Manager. I do Meta ads, Google ads, EDMs, blogs, organic social, website management… If you can see it across TradeMutt’s online presence, that’s my responsibility. A goal this year is to broaden away from purely digital marketing attention into the more old school, harder-to-attribute “traditional” avenues. Also keen to better learn how to project manage and how to manage people, especially around delivering negative feedback. There is such a thing as too nice. Also rediscovered some video panache so keen to return to that more this year both personally and professionally.
  
• Got this website back up and running. That’s a positive. I’ve pushed live a new short story roughly each month since July which is great though this place needs a lot of work. I need to better segment it into, like, fiction vs. essays vs. articles. There’s a non-fiction, digital marketing-specific piece called Traffic Arbitrage that I’ve been sort of lightly sitting on for ages and ages but it’s a great place to start getting some more traction. There’s also in my head a pretty straightforward, low investment but sort of high upside way to drive some traffic to this website so I’ll expand on that in my Google Docs and get the ball rolling when that makes sense.
  
• Moved into my apartment. This has been the first time in my life that I’ve lived alone — truly just me in a one bedroom place — and there have been all sorts of wonderful benefits like much less stress about general cleanliness but there has been too a balance of, like, needing to be responsible for myself entirely. That is: no one else will call me on my bullshit — mostly drinking too much and playing too many videogames. But at the end of the day it is my house and only the bank now could take it away which they will not. Complete too with the replica Eames.
  
• Re: exercise, there are a few things. First, I started going to yoga once a week through the first half of the year before and even after I hurt myself. Then I managed to run 50 kilometre weeks for a good stretch which was a great experiment in longer, more endurance-specific distances. Third, I got a PT in the back half of the year to help with just general direction re: strength training and that’s been a great investment too.
  
• Not sure how many books I read but there were some absolute rippers. I started the year finishing Infinite Jest which was a summer project from December ’23 to January ’24 and I ended the year finishing The Pale King on the 29th of December ’24. Other highlights were The Dry, Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op short stories, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, and The Night Manager.
  
• Breakbone, a novel I’ve been working for two years now — a chapter of which was excised a while ago and published on my old fiction website but it was a bit spoiler-y so it’s gone now — finished the year in an interesting spot with a late structural edit and a few chapters to insert in between ones that exist and new characters to flesh out and then use to supersede old ones to sort of streamline the story and, as the murder mystery unfolds, spin some twists. I want to traditionally publish but there is a world too where that traffic arbitrage digital marketing plan for this website also turns into a self-published Breakbone. But I have a lot to learn about self-publishing first. Let’s see. I also have ideas for two sequels: the first, which is the newer idea, is about an art heist from a yacht on the Brisbane River; the second, which is the older idea, is about a neo-bushranging play.
  
• I travelled only domestic in ’24 but it was a fair bit more travelling than I did in ’23. All the journeying I did in ’23 was to Newcastle for a work thing for two days that I turned into four, extending over the weekend while I knew no one and nothing about Newy. Last year was Maleny, Tangalooma, Hobart, Melbourne, Kingscliff. I’m off to Japan for three weeks in twelve days so this will be a year with heavy international travel upfront and maybe a shorter stint into cheaper South East Asia in the tail half of the year but it will too be a more financially responsible year in general.
  
• Of course saving the best for last: I made it through the first of my relationship with Jess. A January 6th anniversary already fast approaching.

This fun idea that I had about how this piece would turn out when I went to write it — which was originally going to be yesterday before the time escaped me — was that the opener would be the same length as the number of extra words I needed to write every day, for 366 days, to get to the 1,000,000 word count. The way I planned this was going to be some cute, some thematic, some poetic-like reference to the time on a bus on the way to the airport in Naples headed back home to London that I read the Wikipedia page on writing.

Instead I just wound up a little bit short on the first draft of the opener of this document. A summary of this process for the year, things learned, and the start of it is that I’m proud of on reflection. 276 words per day every day for a year. Not many. But enough in the compounding aggregate. From ‘This is not fiction,’ through to, ‘In no particular order except the way they’re coming to me we have.’ That’s it. What’d that take? Like ten minutes tops and that includes how long it took to come up with the angle to start.

Of course I had to first lengthen the first draft of the opener then trim the last line a bit to make it all work but it mostly works I think. I’m writing now about the flourish because it will be good to remember.

As for resolutions and targets again this year:

• 750,000 words for the year. 1,000,000 was too many but 750,000 I’ve done now twice in two successive years. It’s the kind of volume that you don’t get by accident but it also doesn’t seem to take a whole life’s focus to pull off.
  
• 1,000 kilometres run. I did this in ’24 and ’23. I’ll run the Gold Coast Marathon again too, my second time and my third year completing a marathon. A potential consideration: an Iron Man 70.3 before a full Iron Man in, like, a year or two?
  
• I’d like to pull in ~25% more money — personally, not professionally — than last year. I’ll keep the figures private but I’ll publish that target here. It’ll be a pretty straightforward calculation I think.
  
• I’m also not sure how to put a number on it but I’d like to be a better manager, to be more organised, and a bit more process-driven. I like to think I have a more creative default but I also do love tracking the progress of things in a spreadsheet.

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