Oof… it’s been a while since the last one of these. Three whole months, in fact. But, hopefully, after taking time off from this WIP to grieve, I’m back in the writing game. Keep reading to learn how I dove back into Follow the Arrows after my second major break from writing this book!

If You Missed Past Updates, You Can Recap Here:

• My New WIP: Follow the Arrows
• Follow the Arrows (Update #1)
• Follow the Arrows (Update #2)
• Follow the Arrows (Update #3)

Late March 2025: Easing Back into Writing (For the Second Time)

The last time I lost someone close to me, I cranked out words like nobody’s business. At the time, The Fall became my fastest-written work to date. I attribute this to The Fall being a story about navigating life through grief, which I was going through myself at the time.

Losing my uncle in February had the opposite effect on my creativity. Follow the Arrows is a much happier story than The Fall, and happy days during February and March were few and far between. I’ve already mentioned why a couple times here in recent posts on Authoring Arrowheads, but those weeks held some of the darkest days of my life thus far. I didn’t want to do much of anything I loved, besides escaping into reading.

God pulled me out of that pit of depression though, and on March 29th, I sat down in front of my laptop and dared to write again. I had only written a total of 952 words in early February and stopped after that, so I wasn’t expecting much. I also decided to stop drafting the manuscript in Atticus. This decision was not due to Atticus itself, but because I’m more comfortable writing in Google Docs and thought the switch would help me ease back into writing. Because of some (albeit rare) glitches I’ve experienced when writing in Atticus, I already had a backup of Follow the Arrows ready to go in Google Docs and continued writing from there.

My first day back writing Follow the Arrows rendered a surprising 560 words! Though I only wrote one more day in March, God allowed me to write 714 words that day, making March’s total word count 1,274 words. My usual word count goal for the month is 10,000 words if I’m able to write consistently, so I was overjoyed with the progress God enabled me to make in just two days!

By the end of March, Follow the Arrows totaled in at 14,882 words.

April 2025: Getting Reacquainted with Writing Consistently

While I usually don’t like it when new months don’t start on a Sunday or Monday (I know, I’m weird), April starting on a Tuesday helped me keep the writing momentum from late March going. By Friday of that week, Follow the Arrows gained an additional 2,441 words!

I ended up not writing the next Monday but managed to write the remaining four days that week on my lunch break for a total of 1,894 new words. Admittedly, I was bummed about not writing as much as I had the previous week but was determined to keep going.

Powering through some scenes that were giving me trouble and stopping to research bowling lane machinery more times than I could count, I wrote consistently from the 14th to the 18th… for a total of 1,524 additional words. The 14th was my least productive writing day of the year so far, with only 74 words. The very next day, I had my most productive writing day of the week, at 570 words. To say my daily word counts have been see-sawing is an understatement.

The next week (the 21st through the 26th), the daily word counts saw a bit more consistency. I decided not to write that Thursday in favor of taking a brief break to read but made that session up on Saturday. That time off helped tremendously, as my next couple writing sessions both brought forth over 500 words each, when I had been struggling to write between 300-400 words earlier in the week.

Now that I’ve brought you up to date, this week my goal was to reach 10,000 total words for the month. I’ve had to play catch-up a little bit, needing to write just over 1,700 words over the course of three days this week. That doesn’t sound like much, and some writers could easily knock that out in a day, but with my current daily word count average being around 450 words, I wasn’t so sure I could get there.

But God got me there! He has enabled me to write 1,892 words this week so far, surpassing the 10k word mark, with today’s (April 30th’s) session bringing Follow the Arrows‘s total word count to 25,099 words! Part of me wishes I had squeezed just one more word in to make it an even 25,100 words, but I’ll take what I can get. 🙂

Talk to Me, Arrowheads!

Do you have a specific word count goal that you strive to reach each month, or do you choose to not keep track of your word count at all? Let me know in the comments!

Aim high, stay strong, and always hit your mark.

-Allyson 😀