I’ve been writing and drawing stories sporadically since I was old enough to pick up a crayon, and blogged, on-and-off, since 2021. But towards the end of 2024 I made a new year’s resolution to write every day in 2025. It was time to get serious and commit.
I had two goals. First, I wanted to write 100,000 words of fiction by the end of the year. Second, and arguably more importantly, I wanted to develop a writing habit.
The 100,000 word target wasn’t arbitrary. It’s novel length, at least for my customary reading genres of fantasy and science fiction (novels in other genres tend to be shorter). And a bit of maths told me I could achieve it with 300 words per day.
(Pedant’s corner: 100,000 words in a year equates to a daily average of 274 words, but I figured aiming for 300 would allow for time off when unavoidable life stuff got in the way.)
A reasonably coherent 300 words turned out to be achievable in 15 to 30 minutes, depending on my energy reserves. It was a level of commitment that wasn’t overly demanding. Habits are born of consistency, and I didn’t want to sabotage it by allowing noob enthusiasm to drown out practicality.
300 words was a minimum. Some days I gritted my teeth and ground them out. On other days I got through 600 words before I knew it.
Writing time was exactly that: putting words on the page. I made no allowance for editing. I figured I’d squeeze that in somehow, somewhen. The realities of editing, I later discovered, turned out to be… exacting.
In the dying days of 2024 I jotted down a few plot notes, and hit the keyboard on January 1st 2025.
Rubber, meet road.
Despite the target of 100,000 words, I didn’t set out to write a novel. That would have meant significant plotting and structuring in advance. Some novelists are happy to write a first draft without any idea where they’re heading, but I need a road map. In the early 2020s, I tried the ‘pantser’ approach with a long-form story. It was like diving head first into a puddle.
The plan was to write five novelettes featuring the same protagonist, each around 20,000 words. It started well. The first story came in at 24,000 words, and it was the longest single piece of fiction I’d ever written. But it had major issues.
The protagonist – Erik Zeto by name, but a half-baked prototype of the character who lives on this site – was not well defined. I didn’t have a secure grip on who he was or how he viewed the galaxy he inhabited.
He was a clichéd tough guy action hero, spitting out B-movie quips. The demonstrative opening fight scene was satisfyingly crunchy, but it had zero relevance to the story that followed.
I’d started writing a story, but I had no theme. I figured out what it could be as I ploughed on. But developing it meant that I’d have to revise the opening.
Vale, the antagonist, was another problem. He gave Erik his race-against-time mission into space on the fastest spaceship available, and then somehow beat him to the destination. So, another note to self: revise a few thousand words and put the bad guy on the ship from the start.
And then, near the end of the thing, a whole new character popped into my head. This was James, a holographic artificial intelligence, who helped bridge several narrative gaps. So in he went, on the understanding that I’d have to go back and introduce him properly.
Despite the patchwork nature of the draft, I felt a sense of achievement: a milestone reached and a writing habit entrenched. I was still engaged by the narrative, and excited about revising it.
Time for plan Z.
That’s how things proceeded through the summer of 2025. I drafted a 7,000 word short story and a few other nuggets, but in general my writing habit mutated into a rewriting habit. Characters developed, the plot tightened, the prose sharpened. By the autumn I had a 48,000 word novella on my hands.
I shared this draft with beta readers among friends and family. Around the same time, Writing Magazine ran a promo offering a free manuscript review by Kevin Anderson and Associates. KAA offers “premier ghostwriting, book coaching, and editing services”, so I knew it was going to be a sales pitch. I had a half hour call with an editor in which we discussed the novella. I was straight with him from the start: I wasn’t going to spend any money. Nonetheless, he was gracious and encouraging, and offered some useful insights on the publishing industry.
I discovered First Draft School on Instagram, an account offering self-editing tips from a published fiction writer. This was when my hand-wavey notions about editing took on a horrifyingly intimidating solidity. It turned out that you can’t, in fact, shoehorn in a bit of light editing whenever you have a spare five minutes. Oh no, it’s much more granular than that. We’re talking word by painstaking word.
I crawled through the first few pages of the novella again, applying First Draft School’s tips as I went. It was like raking a football pitch with a hairbrush. But – sigh – the improvement was undeniable. Bugger. I had a lot of work to do.
So here’s the sitrep as of March 2026. I’ve switched from writing a little bit every day to writing, plotting, editing and illustrating three times per week, in focused chunks of two to three hours. Most weeks I’m achieving 7.5 hours: an entire working day, every week, devoted to nurturing the Zetoverse.
I’m climbing a mountain. But I’m committed, I’ve built up some momentum, and the habit is sustainable. If I don’t get it over the line in 2026, the novella will be out next year.
Oh, and it finally has a title! Check out the opening pages of The Neuroscape Manifest here.
See you in the future, fellow travellers.