quarterly reports – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Q1 2012, or what writer’s angst looks like

Actually, this last quarter wasn’t quite so bad as the title might make it seem. For the first part, I was on roll, writing almost 25k new words a week. But then I finished that project, started a new career, moved to the other side of the world…yeah, my writing took a hit. Or at least, that’s how it feels.

In January, I was working on Stars of Blood and Glory, and was really on a roll. The application process for TLG was still pending, but I pretty much knew I was getting in, and since I was staying with my parents until it went through, I didn’t have to worry much about money issues. With lots of writing time, I finished SBG in about 6 weeks and published Journey to Jordan. Life was good.

After Stars of Blood and Glory, I went back to Star Wanderers, finishing up Part II and starting Part III. However, something felt wrong, and I didn’t really know what it was. With my TLG departure date imminent, it was really hard to focus, and I wasn’t in much of a position to move on to anything else. That’s when the angst began.

I flew out to Georgia on February 15th, did a week of training in Tbilisi, and then was whisked about 220 kilometers away to Kutaisi. As a consequence, I didn’t get any real writing done for almost a month. However, I didn’t have any major challenges navigating the new culture, and was soon settled pretty comfortably.

The trouble was, nothing was working. Star Wanderers was broken, and I was too close to the project to fix it. But after putting it on the back burner, I didn’t know what to do. For most of March, I switched from one project to another. Nothing seemed to stick, though, and by the end, I was getting pretty antsy.

What if I’d made a mistake to come to Georgia? What if that was the reason nothing was working? It sounds silly now, but that was what was going through my mind. I still worry about it a little, but I think it has to do more with my creative process than anything here in Georgia.

I have a very non-linear way of writing first drafts. After starting the revision for Heart of the Nebula and making some good progress on that, I got an idea for Star Wanderers and moved back to that. At this point, I think the only way to get productive again is to finish that project, even if it sucks. I’ve got a lot of great ideas for other stories, but until I can close the book on this one, I don’t think I’ll be able to make much progress.

So that’s where things stand right now. All in all, it wasn’t a bad quarter, but I’ll be happy when I’ve actually finished something for a change. Hopefully, that’ll only be a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing.

Q3 Report, 2011

Before I move on to other, more interesting subjects, I want to take a little bit of time to review how my writing went in the past three months. For those of you who may be new, this is something I like to do at the start of each new quarter. Keeps me honest, I guess.

Anyhow, here goes:

This is a graph of my word count totals for the past quarter. The red line shows how many words I wrote each day, while the blue line shows a running seven day total. I include substantive revisions in the totals, but if all I’m doing is proofreading or running through copy edits, I don’t count it.

For the first half of July, I was finishing up the third draft of Desert Stars while working 40 hours per week. I wasn’t writing as much as I’d have liked, but still managed to keep some good momentum.

The HUGE peak at the end of the month represents my first draft of Sholpan, which I finished in only a week. I spent the next week in a weird writerly limbo, not sure what else to work on, then picked it up again and made some substantial changes before sending it to my editor in in mid-August. Then Worldcon happened, and I didn’t get any writing done while I was out at that. Should have, but oh well.

After Worldcon, I had maybe three or four different projects I wanted to do, but since I wanted to do the final draft of Desert Stars in October, I wasn’t sure which project to pick up. After several false starts, I ended up writing the first part of Star Wanderers, which is that hump you see at the beginning of September. The second hump is the second draft; my writing took a dip in between because I didn’t know what else to do with only a couple weeks before October.

Overall, though, my personal word counts were a lot lower than I’d like. Part of that was due to the effort I put into publishing Sholpan (it takes a lot of time and energy to publish something, which can eat into your writing if you aren’t careful); part of it was because the project I was most excited about was Desert Stars, and I had to wait until October to hear back from my first readers; but another major part was that I was trying to balance a 40 hour job on top of everything.

This is the dilemma: I want to build up my writing career to the point where I can support myself on it, but to do that I have to work a day job to make ends meet, which makes it very difficult to work on the writing career. When I was in school, I used to think a 9-5 job would make things easy, since I wouldn’t have any homework or papers to bring home. Now, though, I think school was easier, because I was only in the classroom 15 to 20 hours per week, and could allocate the rest of my time as I saw fit. Working full time is a lot harder, because half of your waking time doesn’t belong to you.

What I’d really like to find is a part time job, maybe 30 hours per week, where I earn just enough to get by but don’t feel drained when the workday is over. A lot of TEFL jobs are only about 20 hours or so per week, so I’m thinking very seriously about doing that. Then again, all the attendant difficulties of adjusting to a new culture might be even more draining than grunt labor.

I guess there’s only one way to find out…

In any case, now that October is here, I’m back to work on Desert Stars, hopefully the final draft before publication. I know I said I’d finish Star Wanderers, but since I’m going to come back to it anyway after I get the feedback from my first readers, I figure it will be better to finish Desert Stars and move on. Also, I can revise a lot faster than I can write new material, so it makes a lot more sense to get the revisions out of the way instead of pushing a rough draft harder than it wants to come.

And after that? Who knows! I’ve so many half-finished novels and projects I want to start, all I can really say is I’d better throw this up on the blog and get back to writing. So on that note

Q2 roundup

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!

Q1 report, 2011

So in terms of writing, this was a pretty decent quarter. Nothing too prolific, but definitely making progress on my writing goals for 2011, which include:

1) finish at least two polished novels,
2) finish at least three new rough drafts,
3) start at least four major new projects.

The spike in the graph from the beginning of the month is from the final revision of Bringing Stella Home, which was pretty much just a final polish. After that was finished, I had a little difficulty picking up the next project, but once I did, I was able to be pretty consistent.

In mid-January, I picked up Worlds Away from Home and worked on that until the beginning of March. This was a pretty huge overhaul, especially for the end, but it still needs a lot of work. Basically, this draft was just to get it to the point where I could send it out to my first readers without being eternally ashamed.

After finishing WAFH 2.1 in the beginning of March, I launched right back into the sequel for BSH, Into the Nebulous Deep. I figured it would be good to have the sequel in hand, in case I decided to go indie with BSH, as well as to practice writing sequels.

All throughout March, the writing was surprisingly steady, but recently things have kind of gone off kilter. Maybe it’s all the increased distractions (job interviews, EPIK application, the TEFL course, other random crap), or maybe it’s just that I’ve become less disciplined, but I don’t feel like I’ve been writing very consistently in the last little while. And the graph doesn’t really show that, because I recently started a few other projects which have sort of taken the place of ITND.

The first of these is currently untitled, but it takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of our world which I’ve code named “The Blight.” I don’t want to say much about it, but it’s REALLY REALLY REALLY cool…trust me. Think lone man, wandering the ruins of civilization two hundred years after its fall, trying to make a life for himself when everyone else around him dies at a ridiculously early age because of this blight that has swept across all of humanity.

I’m having a TON of fun building this world, and the story is practically writing itself. In the interest of finishing what I start, though, I’m going to sideline it until ITND is completely finished (which should be by the end of April, inshallah…).

The other project is a novella version of BSH, basically taking just Stella’s viewpoints and telling the story of her capture and eventual ascension to the Hameji throne. This project shouldn’t be too hard–basically, I’m just frankensteining it from BSH, with a few tweaks. My main reason for writing it is to have a novella-length work that I can release as an ebook, possibly to generate interest in Bringing Stella Home.

Speaking of which, in March I released a couple of short stories as ebooks on Amazon. It’s a little early to gauge how well they’re doing, but I’m learning a lot from the experience, and the sales are gradually trickling in. Once I release a few more works and start promoting them, I expect the sales will grow.

So in the last three months, I’ve finished one polished novel (Bringing Stella Home), started two new projects (Sholpan and untitled (the blight)), and made progress on polishing Worlds Away from Home. I wrote / revised through 170k words, about 30k to 50k of which were all new material. I also ventured into indie publishing and released two short stories on Amazon, which are earning me a buck or two each week.

Overall, it hasn’t been as prolific as other quarters, but it’s not been too bad either. Now to finish ITND and make some progress on that freaking nashostomo…

Q4 report, 2010

For those of you who don’t know, I do a report on my blog at the end of each quarter, giving a progress update on my writing. I like to think it helps me keep things professional. Whether or not it does, it’s certainly helpful to look back on how I did.

So anyhow, here’s the word count chart:

The red line represents daily word count, and the blue line is a running total for the previous seven days. The chart includes revisions as well as original material; for revisions, I just do a wordcount of the finished version, whether or not I’ve cut out significant chunks of the text or left it largely as-is. Maybe that skews the picture a bit, but it’s the best I can do with the tools I have.

At the beginning of the quarter, I was working 40+ hours per week at a seasonal job, so the writing was pretty slow, averaging a little less than 15k per week. My main project was the fourth draft of Mercenary Savior, which I was struggling to get ready for World Fantasy.

The job ended October 28th, and I didn’t do any writing during the conference, which is why you see the dip at the end of the month. But I took November off to work entirely on my writing, which is why things took off again rather quickly.

That huge peak in the middle of the quarter is from the fifth draft of Genesis Earth, which I completed in about two weeks. The draft was already pretty well polished, but one of my hard sf friends did a read through and got back with a few major science issues which I needed to rectify. Also, I figured it was in need of a language polish, since I finished the last revision almost a year ago and my writing (I hope) has improved a lot since then.

I was pretty surprised at how quickly it went. The book is definitely as good as I can make it, and any further revisions without professional editorial assistance would be a less effective use of my time.

Things dropped off rather sharply, however, because I spent all of Thanksgiving week either on the road or with family. Ah, how I love road trips…but they sure can throw a kink in the writing schedule. I also had a hard time settling on my next big project, which is why things took a while to take off again after I got back.

After starting a sequel for Mercenary Savior and toying around with a short story idea, I decided to do a major overhaul of Worlds Away from Home. Unlike GE, however, WAFH really, really sucks. It took me two weeks just to read through the rough draft and pick out all the troubled spots, after which I rewrote the outline from the ground up and decided to completely scrap half the book. I started the second draft in mid-December, but it’s taken a while for things to really build steam.

Right as I was starting WAFH 2.0, a couple of other writer friends from World Fantasy got back to me with their comments on Mercenary Savior, and pointed out a few problems that I hadn’t noticed before. I started the revision on December 21st and have been plowing through ever since. That accounts for the huge spike at the end of the quarter–like GE 5.0, the draft has a lot fewer story problems, but does need a few things fixed for consistency, as well as a language polish.

Overall, I wrote or revised through about .25 million words this past quarter–some of which were easier than others. I started a new project (Into the Nebulous Deep), polished one of my manuscripts to the very best of my abilities, and made significant headway on revising and polishing two others. In terms of publications, I had a major article published in Mormon Artist, and a short poem accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of Leading Edge.

Not a bad quarter. Now, let’s see if I can find an agent and/or publisher in 2011.

Third Quarter 2010

This might be more than a little dorky, but I keep track of how much I write each day in a giant spreadsheet and do a blog post at the end of each quarter summing up how things went. It’s October already, so this is the Q3 report. Here goes:

In July, I was working part time at the call center and donating plasma while looking for work. I look back on it now and it seems that I had a ton of free time, and perhaps that shows in the way my productivity climbed way up in the first part of the month…but then it fell back down and never picked up again.

Part of that might have to do with the difficulty of the story. Around the middle of July, I wrote through my half-finished draft of Worlds Away from Home and started drafting entirely new material. It was my first time composing a new story in over a year, and I found it pretty tough. At one point, I had to bike down the Provo river trail and write on a park bench just to get the creative juices to flow. It was difficult.

The first big dip in the beginning of August came because of my day trip to Saint George to interview Dave Wolverton. That threw a fairly decent kink in my writing routine. The second dip towards the end of August came when I was between projects (Worlds Away from Home and Mercenary Savior).

I’m not sure why I was never able to break 20k words per week, or why most of the time I was writing below 15k. I got a new job in mid-September, but my writing productivity actually increased. It’s frustrating, because I wish every day could be a 4k or 5k day, where everything is flowing and the story is awesome. Blarg.

So anyway, with World Fantasy coming up in just a month (yikes!), my goal is to finish Mercenary Savior before the conference, which means I’ll have to do about 55k words in the next 25 days. That comes to 2.2k per day, but I want to push that up to about 3k if I can. No more Princess Maker or late night Halo!

Towards that end, I’m going to try out an experiment. Starting tonight, I’m going to go to bed before midnight and wake up before 5:00 am in order to get in a couple hours of writing before work. I hate coming home after a long day and thinking “man, I’ve still got to put in today’s writing.”

I’m hoping that this way, I’ll be able to get 1.5k/2k done in the morning, and another 1k or so in the evening. I’m also hoping that this will keep me from wasting too much time, since I usually spend a couple hours past midnight each night procrastinating going to bed. Not a sustainable way to live when you work 8 to 5.

One more thing. I submitted to quite a few places during the last quarter, and while I generally got rejections from everyone, I did get my first request for a full manuscript (technically June 29, but close enough). So things are looking up.

And that’s basically how things have been going these past three months: not too great, but not too bad either. And now, before I bore any more of you to death with this post, I’m going to call it a night. Take care and keep being awesome!

Second Quarter 2010 report

As you may or may not know, I keep a spreadsheet of my daily word counts. Nerdy, I know, but you’d be surprised how helpful it can be with keeping goals and staying motivated. As part of that, I’ve decided to do a quarterly report here on my blog. Here’s my report for April 2010 through June 2010:

The red line shows my daily word count, and the blue line shows a running 7-day total.

At the beginning of April, I was somewhere in the middle of writing Mercenary Savior 3.0. I was also in the middle of a long and strenuous debacle with BYU’s Washington Seminar. Long story short, I got kicked out under disputed circumstances.

Anyway, that explains the sharp dip in the first couple of weeks. I returned to my parents’ house in Massachusetts on April 6th and spent a week there before moving out to Utah; that explains the short lived bump from April 6 to April 12.

So three weeks before graduation, I came back to Utah with no job, no apartment, no transportation besides my own feet–nothing. Fortunately, some friends helped me out, and for the rest of April and most of May I at least had transportation (bike) and a roof over my head.

Without a job, I had lots of writing time, and I used it well, as you can see. The sharp dip at the end of April corresponds with graduation, when all the family was over and I was spending most of my time with them.

Things dropped off the second half of May, though, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was writing fatigue? I was coming up on the end of Mercenary Savior, and as I remember, the revision was fairly tough. Also, I was stressed out about not having a job, and spent much of my free time looking for work. I found my current part-time job at the end of May, and had a few spikes, but my output never totally recovered.

As an experiment, I took a week off from writing after finishing Mercenary Savior on the first of June. I thought that this would help me recharge my creative batteries and get off with Worlds Away from Home on a good start. Instead, I found that taking the time off made it harder to get back into creative writing mode, and so I struggled for the first week or two to really get that project off the ground.

Lately, I’ve been trying to bump up my output above 10k per week, without much success. For some reason, I seem to have fallen in a rut where I can’t write more than 2k per day. 2k is good, but it’s not the level where I want to be. I want to finish Worlds Away from Home in the first couple weeks of August, so that I’ll have plenty of time to polish Mercenary Savior for World Fantasy in November.

I think that part of the problem lies in the nature of the work. Mercenary Savior was all straight up revision, with very little new content. Worlds Away from Home, however, involves a ton of new content. Yes, I’ve got all that stuff I wrote back in the fall of 2008, but I’ve also added a new viewpoint character and significantly changed the basic storyline. Only about half of the old stuff is recyclable, and I’ll run out of it in 100 pages, roughly at the midway point of the novel.

After revising for so long, it’s hard to get used to writing a first draft. I’m not sure how to describe it, except that it takes a lot more mental energy–a LOT more. Plus, there’s always the nagging voices that tell you what you’re writing is crap–and when you’re writing your rough draft, the voices are usually right! Tuning them out is starting to be a challenge.

Overall, though, I’m very optimistic. My main goal is to produce one solid, polished novel a year, and I’m still on schedule to accomplish that. Mercenary Savior requires AT LEAST another revision before it’ll be good enough to send out to editors and agents, but I’ve got half a year to do that. As for 2011, I’ll almost certainly have the first or second draft of Worlds Away from Home before January 1st. Things are going well.

And on that note, I think I’m going to take a shower and go to bed. Night.

Quarterly report

So I figure that since I want to write professionally, it would be a good idea to keep track of my writing and do quarterly updates on my blog. Here’s the first one for this year:

The red line shows my daily writing word count, the blue line a running seven day total. The graph starts January 1st and goes to March 31st.

For the first part of January, the seven day total was high for a week because I’d just finished Bringing Stella Home 2.0. It dropped down way low for a while because I was busy moving into the Barlow center, starting my internship, and starting a new novel at the same time. Combining all three of those things at the same time made for very little progress, until about the middle part of the month.

Things progressed at a moderate rate (about 1k words per day) from the middle of January until snowmageddon, which hit us in the second week of February. I got a lot of writing done while snowed in, and my work in progress at the time, To Search the Starry Sea 1.0, got a lot of momentum behind it.

That momentum started to taper off, as I realized that the story I was writing was different than the story I had in my head. I swear, this happens EVERY time I try to write a novel. I tried to stick with the story in my head, but the gap got wider and wider until I realized the story just wasn’t working.

At the end of February, I decided to put it on the back burner and let my ideas simmer for a while. I’ll probably pick it up again at some point in the future, but not in the short term–I need to put it away for a while. I’m sure I’ll finish it someday, though.

So then, in the beginning of March, I went through all the comments I’d received on Bringing Stella Home. The HUGE spike you see right around the middle of the month represents all the revision notes I put together for the 3.0 draft. I read through the entire manuscript in about a week and a half, made a detailed scene by scene outline, and figured out my strategy for the revision.

Things dropped off again pretty sharply the last couple weeks of March because that was right around when I was fired from my internship. That was one hell of a stressful week. They picked up pretty quick after that, though, because 1) I had a lot more free time, and 2) I’m REALLY excited about this project.

Looking ahead, I think if I push myself, I can finish Bringing Stella Home 3.0 by the end of April. It will be difficult because I’ll be looking for an apartment and a job at the same time, but after next week I won’t have to worry about schoolwork anymore (potentially for the rest of my life…whoa). Definitely, I’ll have it done in time for CONduit 2010.

One thing I need to work on a lot more is submitting. I’ve got a list of agents to submit Genesis Earth to, I just haven’t got around to sending it to them all. The responses I’ve received have been generally encouraging: all rejections, but about half form rejections, half personalized in some way. I do think this book will find it’s way in print, though it may not be my first to be published.

Even though Bringing Stella Home will probably need at least one more major revision before the full manuscript is ready to be sent out to editors/agents, I can probably polish the first three chapters enough to shop it around sometime in May. I’m not sure if that’s what I’ll do, but it’s an option. It depends on whether I jump right in to the 4.0 revision after finishing the current draft, which I probably won’t do; better to let it sit for a while.

Instead, I think I’ll jump right in to finishing that novel I started in late 2008, Hero in Exile. The title will have to change (as always), but I’ve got a lot of fresh ideas for it, plus the enthusiasm to pull it off. In many ways, Hero in Exile is a non-linear sequel to Bringing Stella Home, so if I get a deal with the one, I can always pitch the other as the next in the series. That’s a huge plus–and a major reason why I’ll be enthusiastic about the project, since the two novels build off of each other.

Anyway, that’s what things are looking like from here. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I’ll read a couple of friends’ novels (I haven’t forgotten about you, Jakeson and Drek!), graduate, get an apartment, get a job (inshallah), write an article for Mormon Artist, go to a con or two, and maybe even get a girlfriend and/or figure out what to do with my life.