![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/2010q3wordcounts.jpg\" "\\"2010q3wordcounts\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nIn July, I was working part time at the call center and donating plasma while looking for work.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Part of that might have to do with the difficulty of the story.\u00a0 Around the middle of July, I wrote through my half-finished draft of Worlds Away from Home<\/em> and started drafting entirely new material.\u00a0 It was my first time composing a new story in over a year, and I found it pretty tough.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was difficult.<\/p>\n The first big dip in the beginning of August came because of my day trip to Saint George to interview Dave Wolverton.\u00a0 That threw a fairly decent kink in my writing routine.\u00a0 The second dip towards the end of August came when I was between projects (Worlds Away from Home<\/em> and Mercenary Savior<\/em>).<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 I got a new job in mid-September, but my writing productivity actually increased.\u00a0 It’s frustrating, because I wish every day could be a 4k or 5k day, where everything is flowing and the story is awesome.\u00a0 Blarg.<\/p>\n So anyway, with World Fantasy coming up in just a month (yikes!), my goal is to finish Mercenary Savior<\/em> before the conference, which means I’ll have to do about 55k words in the next 25 days.\u00a0 That comes to 2.2k per day, but I want to push that up to about 3k if I can.\u00a0 No more Princess Maker or late night Halo!<\/p>\n Towards that end, I’m going to try out an experiment.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I hate coming home after a long day and thinking “man, I’ve still got to put in today’s writing.”<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not a sustainable way to live when you work 8 to 5.<\/p>\n One more thing.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 So things are looking up.<\/p>\n And that’s basically how things have been going these past three months: not too great, but not too bad either.\u00a0 And now, before I bore any more of you to death with this post, I’m going to call it a night.\u00a0 Take care and keep being awesome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 It’s October already, so this is the Q3 report.\u00a0 Here goes: In July, I was working… Continue reading Third Quarter 2010<\/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],"tags":[42,402,383,155,186,397],"class_list":["post-3136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","tag-frustrations","tag-procrastination","tag-quarterly-reports","tag-rough-drafts","tag-submitting","tag-world-fantasy-2010","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-OA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3136","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=3136"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3149,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3136\/revisions\/3149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}