Happy Law Bringer Day!  Admittedly, I've never celebrated it before today, but you know every tradition has to start somewhere.  

Today marks the six year anniversary of when (after several mouths of brainstorming and nearly three years of not writing any fiction) I started writing the first story in what would become "Law Bringer".  I thought about honoring the occasion by posting a teaser or snippet of an actual story, but instead I decided to write about my writing.   

Recently, I collected the info below by pouring through my old word documents and obviously this isn't one-hundred percent accurate either because of poor record keeping or stories lost to computer crashes, but it should give you a good idea of my writing output over the years.  

Words written per year:
2004-07: less than 1,000 words
2008-10: 14,000 words
2011: 11,000 words
2012-13: 6,000 words
2016-17: 2,200 words
2018-21: 1000 words

I don't know why I started writing I just did, although, I should point out that of the 35,000 words I wrote from 2004-2021 all I have to show for it is:
2 short stories (including a Hero Factory story I posted here)
A lot of flash fiction most of which is either BIONICLE or Hero Factory fan fiction or not very good (or both).
For some reason during this time period my go-to writing format was like the appendices from LOTR even before I knew what those were.  No idea why.  
 
Something else I want to mention; I rarely finished most of my work from this time.  This is definitely something I've improved this year because now I can actually write a short story from beginning to end.  The idea popped into my head to try and finish some of my old stuff, but after actually reading some of it I figure most of it is best left where it is.  

This trip down memory lane confirms the narrative I've always assumed that writing was something I did in junior high up to the summer after my freshman year, but in my sophomore year I stopped and no matter how hard I tried or wanted to I just couldn't write fiction again.  I kept writing notes and world building, but another piece of prose never came.  I cannot explain why.    

Bringing this back to "Law Bringer", like I said I wrote the first bits of the story in late 2016 and early 2017, but then the block returned.  I spent a long time working on my world building on-and-off until 2019/2020 when I got really serious about it and by this point I really wanted to make an attempt to write again hence my little bits of writing during this time period.  

Then last November I started watching videos about writing on Youtube.  Before this, everything I knew about writing I learned from BZPower or what writers have said so just random sources.  I don't think that's the only thing I needed, but I'm sure it helped and on Christmas Eve of 2021 I began to write and write, then run out of steam in the spring, but picked it back up in May and eventually managed to create some good writing habits.  

The long and short of it is this past year I've written 105,000 words resulting in:  
22 short stories (18 "Law Bringer" 4 non-"Law Bringer")
A fourth of a novel
Half of a novella
2 pieces of flash fiction (both much better than anything I wrote several years ago)

You know, after writing this out, I think December 24th sounds like a better date for Law Bringer Day, but since no one would celebrate it then because of conflicts with other holidays, I think I'll stick to November 30th. 

That's the story I wanted to tell and also why I'm optimistic about the future of my writing and "Law Bringer" and I'm hopeful I'll be able to share more of both with the world soon.