{"id":5407,"date":"2011-07-12T11:56:40","date_gmt":"2011-07-12T17:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=5407"},"modified":"2011-07-12T11:56:40","modified_gmt":"2011-07-12T17:56:40","slug":"q2-roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/q2-roundup\/","title":{"rendered":"Q2 roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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. \u00a0In 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.<\/p>\n

So, without further ado, here are last quarter’s numbers:<\/p>\n

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The red line represents daily word counts, the blue line is simply a running total of the past 7 days. \u00a0Because 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. \u00a0I do not include proofreading, though, or sentence \/ paragraph level revisions for basic errors.<\/p>\n

In April, I was plugging through the middle of the first draft of\u00a0Into the Nebulous Deep<\/em>\u00a0and working a temp job full-time doing data entry. \u00a0I had just indie published my first three short stories and was still trying to figure out how the system works. \u00a0Despite 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0This was also the week before my youngest sister got married, so that threw a kink in the works. \u00a0The job also caught up to me, so in the last week of April my productivity took a real hit.<\/p>\n

In May, however, I took time off from the job to “pursue a freelance project” (aka epublish Genesis Earth<\/em>). \u00a0My 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/em>\u00a0 This was the third draft, so I was WAY stoked to work on it. \u00a0Outlined 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. \u00a0It was glorious.<\/p>\n

When my editor and cover artist got back to me at the end of the month, however, I put Desert Stars<\/em>\u00a0on the back burner for about a week to go over the copy edits for Genesis Earth<\/em>\u00a0and give it one final proofread. \u00a0That’s why things dropped off again toward the end of the month.<\/p>\n

In June, I went back to the temp job to save up for Worldcon. \u00a0<\/em>Fortunately, I was able to strike a pretty good balance between writing and work that lasted for the rest of the quarter. \u00a0If 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.<\/p>\n

So yeah, it was a pretty routine quarter. \u00a0Nothing too spectacular, though there were some ups and downs. \u00a0If you count Bringing Stella Home<\/em>, I’m on track to complete two polished books this year once I finish Desert Stars.<\/em>\u00a0 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). \u00a0Still, I’m averaging about two months per draft per book, so I’m optimistic about getting it out in time for Christmas.<\/p>\n

My next project after Desert Stars<\/em>\u00a0will probably be the sequel to Into the Nebulous Deep<\/em>. \u00a0I’ll work as hard on that until it stalls, then spend a couple of weeks to put together Sholpan, <\/em>a novella with the events of Bringing Stella Home\u00a0<\/em>told entirely from Stella’s point of view. \u00a0I’ll probably put that one up for $.99 or so to generate interest in Bringing Stella Home<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So yeah, that’s what things look like for the immediate future. \u00a0Still working, still saving for Worldcon, but the writing is coming along and I should be publishing a few more ebooks in the near future. \u00a0So stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0In 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,… Continue reading Q2 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":[68,44,32,541],"tags":[349,192,222,46,147,383,156,312,562],"class_list":["post-5407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","category-ge","category-sholpan-novella","tag-balance","tag-discovery-writing","tag-endings","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-momentum","tag-quarterly-reports","tag-revising","tag-work","tag-worldcon-2011","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1pd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5407","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=5407"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5470,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5407\/revisions\/5470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}