Mid Year Check In
2026 SMART goals.
At the start of the year, I wrote a post about making SMART goals. I’ve helped many students write these for their academics, and while I also have writing goals, I don’t think I shared my goals for 2026.
Better late than never!
2026 Writing Goal
By the end of 2026, I will write 450,000 words. This goal is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Yes, that looks like a lot. And it is. And I have already achieved that many words or more four years in a row.(So I know it is achievable and realistic!)
What this looks like when you break it down:
450,000 words a year is:
37,500 words per month
8,654 words per week
1,237 words per day (So close to being 1234! lol)
Does that mean I write 1200+ words everyday? It doesn’t. But I know myself. There’s always one or two months of the year where I will get closer to 3,000 words a day (hello November!), and some months where I am editing where I will struggle to reach 800. Still, I balance out the months where I aim for 25,000 words with ones where I go for 50,000 or 75,000 words. It all depends on where I am in my writing process.
Where Am I Now?
As of yesterday, June 26, 2026, I have written 212,732 words. I am 47.3% of the way through my goal. I am running a bit behind my goal, but I’m on a catching up streak.
What Do I Count?
There are so many ways people count their words and the need for confirmation about what counts and what doesn’t baffles me. I learned early on in re-starting my life as a writer that word count goals were very motivating to me. I started ahead on my first ever novel writing month and I stayed ahead the whole month (100,000 words!). I also had a manuscript that had been stuck in my head for more than twenty years that demanded release. (Read more about that here.) When I started editing that manuscript and tried to track minutes or pages, it wasn’t the same motivation. I now edit by striking through unwanted words, count all my new words, and then clean up my docs. That’s how motivating word count goals are for me. I will deal with the mess.
Once I learned what works for me, I set up my own system to keep my motivation. I count all the words that go into my draft. I count all the words I write planning the story. I count the words in the outline, I count the words I put into the spreadsheet where I note how each character agrees or conflicts with another character. I also decided, that since some of my editing days require much more minute changes than sweeping rewrites, that I will count every fifteen minutes of line editing as 250 words. (First, I can write 250 words in fifteen minutes easily. Second, I edit through more than 250 manuscript words in line edits in 15 minutes. So, I feel like I’m shortchanging myself.)
The point, dear reader, is that there are no word counting police. I do what motivates me and I encourage you to do what motivates you.
Word counts might not even be your thing, but maybe you want to do some writing every day (or five days a week, or every weekend). If a streak works better for you, set yourself up with a streak. The goal is, and the reason smart goals exist to help you, is for you to set goals you can accomplish.
Looking Back
So, I’m behind so far this year. I’ve almost caught up, but I’m not quite there yet. And even though I’m not worried about it now (easy for me to say now lol) it wasn’t true at the beginning of the year. See on my TrackBear diagram where the line starts going flat in February? Yeah, I had a life change that left me more exhausted than I have ever known. And you can see when things returned to my version of normal. So as the months ticked through February and March and April and I was doing my best to continue writing and I was moving that line farther and farther away, you can bet I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to make it up.
And even before that, in January, when I was working on a new writing process that wasn’t fast drafting and didn’t result in a complete book in 3-6 weeks, I was worried I had messed up choosing to keep my goal from the year before.
But I made a decision in April to abandon a romantic fantasy project to revamp my epic fantasy project. And getting back into the story that hung around in my brain for more than twenty years is probably the decision that saved this writing goal.
I’m going to catch up. I’ll fumble a bit here and there. But I’ll catch up, and I’ll end the year ahead of my goal.
How are you doing at meeting your goals this year?