Alright, with the first week of school already over, I figure I should recap and evaluate my writing progress this summer.<\/p>\n
When school ended in April, I was still waiting to hear back from Brandon Sanderson’s agent about an internship. \u00a0My backup plan (which I started as soon as classes ended) was to stay in Provo and write full time.<\/p>\n
Sanderson’s agent ended up taking on a different intern, which ended up being the best for both of us, since I get the sense that he was looking to mentor someone who would go on to become a professional agent. \u00a0Me, I was just looking to network and develop some connections in the publishing world, which I did anyway (at least in the local Utah scene). \u00a0Besides, Provo is WAY cheaper than New York!<\/p>\n
From the beginning, I treated writing as a full-time job. \u00a0I set project deadlines, daily and 7-day wordcount goals, and spent somewhere around 8 hours a day working on my various projects. \u00a0I submitted a full to an editor from the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference and partials to the other two editors. \u00a0I also submitted to the Writers of the Future contest and to the LDS Publisher Christmas story contest (much smaller, but geared toward a niche market).<\/p>\n
I started keeping my stats on May 25th, using a spreadsheet to keep track of my daily wordcount for each of my projects, the daily total wordcount, the 7-day cumulative wordcount, and any writing I did for synopses or revision notes. \u00a0Since BYU’s summer recess begins in April, I missed the stats \u00a0for the first three weeks or so, but I kept consistent records since then until now.<\/p>\n
From May 25th to August 31st, I wrote 244,065 words in 8 projects (3 short stories and 5 novel drafts). \u00a0I averaged 2,490 words per day. \u00a0Adjusting for Sundays (I typically take Sundays off), I averaged 2,906 words per day.<\/p>\n
My goals were to write 4k words per day, and to shoot for a constant 7-day total of 24k, but to never let that total dip below 12k words. \u00a0In 98 days, the 7-day running total only went below 12k eleven times–on those particular days, I was either traveling, moving out, moving in, or extremely busy with back-to-school chores. \u00a0For the two weeks I was on vacation, I still wrote more than 12k words each week.<\/p>\n
Interestingly enough, out of the eight fiction projects, only one was a rough draft–a short story that I worked on for two days and never completed. \u00a0The vast majority of my writing went into revising novels that I’d already written.<\/p>\n
I completed the first draft of Bringing Stella Home<\/em> in early June (my third complete novel rough draft). \u00a0Later, in July, I began the second draft. \u00a0I’m currently just over halfway through with the revisions and hope to finish by October 10th.<\/p>\n I started a revision of my first novel, Ashes of the Starry Sea,<\/em> but decided midway through that I was running up against diminishing returns and decided to drop it (I completed the rough draft in April of 2008–it was my first finished novel and the reason I started this blog, waaaaay back in August 2007).<\/p>\n I started a new draft of Hero in Exile,<\/em> making some drastic revisions, but found it difficult to juggle more than one writing project at a time and put it on the back burner. \u00a0I may or may not pick it up again once Bringing Stella Home 2.0<\/em> is finished.<\/p>\n I completed the third draft of Genesis Earth<\/em> and started to submit it. \u00a0I will probably do one language\/readability edit before the World Fantasy convention in late October and try to sell it while I’m there.<\/p>\n Overall, the summer was a practice run to see if I could write full time and survive the insanity. \u00a0I always feared, as a child, that if writing became my full time job I would come to hate it. \u00a0I found, however, that writing full time (8+ hrs\/day, 6 days\/wk) only made me enjoy it more. \u00a0Now that school is back in session, I already wish I had more time and mental space to dedicate to my writing.<\/p>\n I miss the summer, but not because of the lazy days, or the parties, or the vacationing–I miss the opportunity to write full time! \u00a0Provided I can find a way to support a family off of this, I can definitely see myself turning this into a career. \u00a0In the meantime, I’ll keep honing my craft and start working on getting an agent.<\/p>\n Now, more than ever, I feel that breaking in is more of a question of ‘if’ than ‘when.’<\/p>\n \ud83d\ude42 \ud83d\ude42 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alright, with the first week of school already over, I figure I should recap and evaluate my writing progress this summer. When school ended in April, I was still waiting to hear back from Brandon Sanderson’s agent about an internship. \u00a0My backup plan (which I started as soon as classes ended) was to stay in… Continue reading Summer roundup<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68,44,32],"tags":[78,144,82,46,30,8,156,119,142,4,599,63,84,197],"class_list":["post-1048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","category-ge","tag-brandon-sanderson","tag-byu-writing-and-illustrating-for-young-readers-2009","tag-conventions","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-life-decisions","tag-writing-in-general","tag-revising","tag-summer-2009","tag-summer-plans","tag-the-lost-colony","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-triumphs","tag-world-fantasy-2009","tag-writing-lifestyle","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-gU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1048"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1057,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions\/1057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}