Welcome to the archive! You’ve found a post originally shared on Patreon in 2023, republished in 2026 as an archive of the Creature Cravings series. With AI becoming more prevalent in author spaces, sharing the human work and creativity behind each book feels even more important. I am no longer on Patreon, and I did not want this post to disappear in my history.
As a reminder, the below was written during the first release of the Creature Cravings series, which is now being re-written as Lily Hills Creatures. Bite is no longer available, but it will be coming back after it is re-written.
As an ADHD Virgo that loves data, making charts is a lot of fun for me. This behind the scenes post goes into the numbers behind my writing, and not writing process or sales numbers. Don’t worry, you’ll still get those personal anecdotes on writing the original and new version of the series in future updates and in the Foreshadow Special Editions of each release.
Time for our favorite posts, how long did it take me to write Bite? Let’s see.
I started writing Bite in September 2022. Yes. 2022. Before Haunt came out! 😂
However, I wasn’t working on it consistently until Q3 2023. I just had some ideas here and there as I worked on the other books, so I wanted to make sure I wrote it all down.
Here is the chart from Scrivener showing my draft 1 and 2 words per month, before editing.
Total words after editing: 32k
Now when we add in days proofreading and copy editing (11 days total), the updated number is 90 days.
Because I only started using my timetracker in January 2023, I can’t share as many details about what happened with Bite between September 2022 – December 2022, but we see in Scrivener it was only about 3K words and 17 days, so I was likely just writing a few scenes here or there.
For the Nov 10 and Dec 20 days, I must have moved things around or replaced sections, but didn’t add anything new, so it doesn’t add to overall word count.
However, for Jan – Oct, here are the hours dedicated to writing and editing – nearly 72 hours in 2023 for writing Bite.
Also, reminder that none of these charts include marketing time or things like formatting etc. I am better at tracking my writing and editing than marketing. I tend to work on marketing every spare minute I can. I do have some data on it, but I typically only track half of what I do when it comes to marketing.
Total: 32K words in 71.8 hours across 90 day (355 words a day)
How does this compare to other books?
- Blaze: 46K words in 66 hours across 100 days (460 words a day)
- Only: 18.5K words in 42.7 hours across 36 days (513 words a day)
My averages are fairly similar across the projects, give or take 100 words, which is very interesting!
2026 thoughts: I am no longer tracking my hours with each book, but I am using Scrivener for the re-writes, so some of this format will be present in the posts for the updated books.
Even with the data here showing it took only 72 hours to write Bite, that does not mean I could have written it in under two weeks of full-time work. I can’t focus on writing for more than an hour or two at a time, it takes a lot out of me, but it is cool to know that number. For other authors, writing for multiple hours may be their norm. All writers are different.
The new version of Bite is coming soon.
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