For those of you who don’t know, I keep a spreadsheet with my daily writing word count and use that to help set personal deadlines for various projects. In order to keep myself honest, I do a report every quarter on how I kept up with my writing goals in the past three months.
So, without further ado, here are last quarter’s numbers:
The red line represents daily word counts, the blue line is simply a running total of the past 7 days. Because I’m a discovery writer who often does the heavy work of shaping the story in the revision process, I include revision notes and second / third / fourth drafts in these counts. I do not include proofreading, though, or sentence / paragraph level revisions for basic errors.
In April, I was plugging through the middle of the first draft of Into the Nebulous Deep and working a temp job full-time doing data entry. I had just indie published my first three short stories and was still trying to figure out how the system works. Despite this, I was able to keep up a pretty consistent word count for most of the month, though 10k per week is lower than I would have liked.
Endings are probably the hardest thing for me to write, so at the end of the month things came to a head and my word count dropped significantly. This was also the week before my youngest sister got married, so that threw a kink in the works. The job also caught up to me, so in the last week of April my productivity took a real hit.
In May, however, I took time off from the job to “pursue a freelance project” (aka epublish Genesis Earth). My boss had told me he’d like to have me back once the freelance project was finished, so I felt pretty good about taking the month off.
It took a while for my editor and cover artist to get back with the final product, though, so I spent most of May working on Desert Stars. This was the third draft, so I was WAY stoked to work on it. Outlined my revision notes for the first half in a matter of days, which led to the huge peak around the 19th, and launched right into the project full steam ahead. It was glorious.
When my editor and cover artist got back to me at the end of the month, however, I put Desert Stars on the back burner for about a week to go over the copy edits for Genesis Earth and give it one final proofread. That’s why things dropped off again toward the end of the month.
In June, I went back to the temp job to save up for Worldcon. Fortunately, I was able to strike a pretty good balance between writing and work that lasted for the rest of the quarter. If I didn’t have to juggle a full time job with my full time writing, I probably would have written more, but at 15k per week I was able to keep up pretty well with my personal deadlines.
So yeah, it was a pretty routine quarter. Nothing too spectacular, though there were some ups and downs. If you count Bringing Stella Home, I’m on track to complete two polished books this year once I finish Desert Stars. The latest draft is pretty good, but I think it will need at least one more run through with first readers to make sure the changes to the story are good (and I’ve made a LOT of changes to the story). Still, I’m averaging about two months per draft per book, so I’m optimistic about getting it out in time for Christmas.
My next project after Desert Stars will probably be the sequel to Into the Nebulous Deep. I’ll work as hard on that until it stalls, then spend a couple of weeks to put together Sholpan, a novella with the events of Bringing Stella Home told entirely from Stella’s point of view. I’ll probably put that one up for $.99 or so to generate interest in Bringing Stella Home.
So yeah, that’s what things look like for the immediate future. Still working, still saving for Worldcon, but the writing is coming along and I should be publishing a few more ebooks in the near future. So stay tuned!
