Becky Allen Books

YA fantasy writer. Not a morning person.

Category: Writing

  • A screencap of a color-coded spreadsheet with wordcounts (too small to read) broken out by month over 10 years

    2023 Word Count, and 2024 Goals

    Quick check in: with the demise of Tinyletter, I’ve moved my newsletter over to Buttondown. If you subscribed previously you don’t have to subscribe again, and I’m going to continue cross-posting here, too, since I think this version looks nicer than the Buttondown archives. (And if you haven’t subscribed yet: please do!) It’s February, which…

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  • A messy notebook page broken into four columns, each representing 25% of a story outline

    On plotting, and not plotting, and story vibes vs story structure…

    Hi friends, Recently, my best friend and writing buddy said one of the most devastatingly true things about me I’ve ever been faced with. In a discussion about starting a new project where I’m trying to be less structured in my prep (we’ll get to that), she looked me dead in the eye and said,…

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  • A stack of books, focused around The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

    On reading, as a writer

    Hello, friends! So much for my goal of sending a newsletter every month. I kept trying to think of March themes and then didn’t. You came very close to seeing a timeline of my pandemic hair situation but it felt too silly. (Both the newsletter and my pandemic hair, thankfully long since shaved off.) First…

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  • A collage featuring a printed manuscript, an open journal, a keyboard, and some pens

    Getting Back on Track… Slowly: 2022 in Numbers

    Hi. So. I didn’t do my word count blog entry for 2021, because it was a long crappy year and I didn’t feel like it in January and then I forgot. If you’re curious, I spent all of 2021 on a slow, painful, major revision to the project that I’ve been working on for a…

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  • On finishing an experiment

    Hi friends, I usually try to send this newsletter on the first of the month, when I send it at all. (So… rarely.) But did you know that if you spend a month in a 50,000 word writing marathon, you’re very tired and need a few days to process?! So I’m not letting perfect be…

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  • On starting something new–

    Hi friends, It’s October. It’s October?!?! It’s October. Gosh. I’m currently feeling optimistic about a lot of things. Not, like, the fate of the world or anything; that’s still too big and overwhelming to think about. But on a personal level. I started my new job about a year ago now, and while it does…

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  • Writing Through the Pandemic: 2020 Wordcount

    Hello! First a reminder that I only update this blog once a year for this very word count post. If you want to know what I’m up to more often, try my newsletter (though even that isn’t too frequent…). After everything the horrors of last year took from us, perhaps the pettiest complaint is that…

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  • An instagram screenshot where I talk with a classroom of students

    Rereading my own work –

    Hi friends, It started with career day. My sister/roommate is a high school teacher and once a year I get invited to take part in her school’s career day, and spend a morning talking to kids about my career. I go back and forth between talking about my day job in tech and my creative…

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  • On ideas and anxieties —

    Hi friends, I have some happy personal news, which is so simplistic it probably doesn’t count as news at all. It’s this: writing has been going well. Last month I put out my single annual blog entry, where I total up my writing stats… and in 2019, I wrote considerably more than I had in…

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  • Recovering from Burnout: 2019 by the Numbers

    2019 marks the fifth year I’ve tracked my writing and done a summary of it.

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