Last year, I wrote 40011 words of my Broken World* novel, a project that excited (and excites) me so much I spent almost every single one of my train commutes pounding out new words for four months straight.

I even entered into a three-way-duel with fellow writers Bo Balder and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz during the Clarion West Write-A-Thon, just to have an excuse to write even more.

Then, just when the Write-A-Thon was drawing to a close, the Paul Harland Prize hit. Check out the graph to see what judging that most venerable award did to my productivity**. And after the Prize, for which I turned in my judging results on New Year’s Eve, came studying for my General Banking Knowledge exam.

Now the Paul Harland Prize is over, and I’ve passed my exam, I can finally pick up where I left my protagonist: in a terrible jam that promises to get much worse before it improves. If ever.

* A world literally broken, habitable shards of its crust orbiting its fiery, molten core after a terrible cataclysm in its remote past. Thousands of years after the cataclysm, the world threatens to collapse in on itself… but no one even remembers that there used to be one world, or why it broke.

** Not quite entirely unproductive during that period though: I did write 37000 words of judging reports…