![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/2010q4wordcounts.jpg\" "\\"2010q4wordcounts\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe red line represents daily word count, and the blue line is a running total for the previous seven days.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Maybe that skews the picture a bit, but it’s the best I can do with the tools I have.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 My main project was the fourth draft of Mercenary Savior<\/em>, which I was struggling to get ready for World Fantasy.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 But I took November off to work entirely on my writing, which is why things took off again rather quickly.<\/p>\n That huge peak in the middle of the quarter is from the fifth draft of Genesis Earth,<\/em> which I completed in about two weeks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I was pretty surprised at how quickly it went.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Things dropped off rather sharply, however, because I spent all of Thanksgiving week either on the road or with family.\u00a0 Ah, how I love road trips…but they sure can throw a kink in the writing schedule.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n After starting a sequel for Mercenary Savior<\/em> and toying around with a short story idea, I decided to do a major overhaul of Worlds Away from Home<\/em>.\u00a0 Unlike GE, however, WAFH really, really<\/em> sucks.<\/strong> 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.\u00a0 I started the second draft in mid-December, but it’s taken a while for things to really build steam.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, and pointed out a few problems that I hadn’t noticed before.\u00a0 I started the revision on December 21st and have been plowing through ever since.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Overall, I wrote or revised through about .25 million words this past quarter–some of which were easier than others.\u00a0 I started a new project (Into the Nebulous Deep<\/em>), 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<\/a><\/em>, and a short poem accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of Leading Edge<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Not a bad quarter.\u00a0 Now, let’s see if I can find an agent and\/or publisher in 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 I like to think it helps me keep things professional.\u00a0 Whether or not it does, it’s certainly helpful to look back on how I did. So anyhow, here’s… Continue reading Q4 report, 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":[68,44,32],"tags":[89,46,73,369,383,156,155,210,63,397],"class_list":["post-3791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","category-ge","tag-career-decisions","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-planning","tag-publication","tag-quarterly-reports","tag-revising","tag-rough-drafts","tag-the-leading-edge","tag-triumphs","tag-world-fantasy-2010","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-Z9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791","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=3791"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5557,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions\/5557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}