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counting the words
I’m sure you’ll all be surprised to hear I didn’t manage 5K a day for the entirety of January. I did about 70K, which is quite good, if not my Best Month Ever. ROSES IN AMBER has gone through copy edits and I’ll be putting those in on Friday (tomorrow is a rest day) and hopefully it’ll drop early next week.
I finished another revision pass on REDEEMER, which I think involved writing about 3-5K but only netted me 1K on the book. It has one more pass to go, then back to the editor.
This month I’m all about revisions, not just on REDEEMER, but on BEWITCHING BENEDICT, my little Regency romance that I’m hoping to release in May. I’m hoping revising BENEDICT will inspire me to write the synopsis for the next book, so I can get that series really rolling.
I also have to re-read the Negotiator Trilogy, which, frankly, I’m not looking forward to. They were very difficult to write and I’ve never had any urge to go back and re-read them from the top. All I’ve ever done is look stuff up in them. But needs must, because I’m now writing Patreon short stories set in the aftermath of the Negotiator Trilogy, and I have Ambitions to get KISS OF ANGELS, Grace’s story, synopsized this month and written in March. It will be a novella.
(I hope to god it’ll be a novella, she said, grimly looking at both NO DOMINION and ROSES IN AMBER, both of which were meant to be 30K & both of which ended up 60K. But I’ve got 40K of Old Races Aftermath stories right now, so if it turns out to be 60K, the collection will be…just right. She said, planning for the kind of failure she usually experiences….)
All that, and I have two short stories to write.
I might go take a nap…
ytd wordcount: 70,000
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this house of plague
We have not been well, here at this house. We have in fact been sick as dogs. We may even have had the flu: there were certainly fevers and aches and headaches and general misery. I was impressed with how sick I was on Saturday, actually, and then poor Indiana and Ted were wiped out with it by Tuesday. I’m deeply grateful that I’d improved by then, as poor Young Indy was up most of Monday night. “Mama,” he said, “my head hurts. It’s like a bell in here.”
(Which I thought was pretty darn evocative, for a four year old… :))
I’ve just finished writing a nice little 5000 word short story that managed to come in at 9000 words. :) Finishing it pleases me to no end for a bunch of reasons. One, I’ve owed it to the commissioner for a while. Two, it’s a story I wouldn’t have thought of at all without his commission, and I like it, so that makes me happy. Three, it’s the 7th day of the year and I’ve finished something, which is great! :)
Next up is finishing MAGIC & MANNERS, which my Patreon patrons have been very patient about. About 50K left on that, I think, and then I have to do a quick (I hope o.O) revision on my nephew’s book and then onward toward REDEEMER! And nevermind the half-dozen side projects I’d like to jam in there around the edges… o.o :)
ytd wordcount: 5500
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look, i wrote a book
I have, a year late and after half a dozen false starts and tens of thousands of words thrown away, finally finished the 3rd book in the quartet I’m writing for my nephew.
It is, I am pretty confident, utter shit, but Christ, at least it’s finished.
That’s…three, I think. Books I’ve written this year. STONE’S THROE, which will be out–soon! January, maybe, for Kickstarter backers? March or April for everybody else? BEWITCHING BENEDICT, the Regency we’re shopping around, and now SKYMASTER.
Also I have written pretty nearly half of MAGIC & MANNERS, a substantial epic fantasy proposal, a less substantial dystopic YA proposal, a Highlander fic, and…most of a short story for a patron and I need to finish that right away now. :)
Jesus. I’m wrecked. It’s nowhere near the greatest amount of writing I’ve done in a year–it’s maybe 300K, but I don’t think it’s quite that much–but I’m just bloody shattered.
I think I’ll go to bed now.
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wordcount triumph
I set myself a small, realistic wordcount goal this year, because last year was so phenomenally bad. 200K, that was my goal.
I had over 100K by the end of March, so it was something of a letdown to take until yesterday to reach the 200K mark, but I have triumphed and heck, there are still 3 months left in the year! (And I, uh, want to finish at least 2 more books in that time. And write 3 or more short stories…) Still, I reached goal, so that’s nice.
I’m also at 25K on the epic proposal, and have reached the first big beat and due to having switched characters recently am…not done with the chapter. So I’m going to finish the chapter, make a desperate attempt to fix the horked-up timeline, and…probably send it to my beta readers straight off, although there’s a prologue I also want to finish and put into the proposal as a whole.
I don’t normally do beta readers, so this is nerve-wracking. One’s a epic fantasy novelist herself, one’s an epic fantasy reader, one’s my usual first reader (but even he usually gets a full first *draft*, not a partial), and one is essentially the person responsible for this entire project. I suspect I’ll get what I need out of them, as a group, to solidify the proposal. I also suspect that between the prologue and the chapter I know needs expanding the proposal chapters will in fact come in over 30K, which on any sensible book would be a full third of the manuscript but will probably be more like a sixth of this one.
I further suspect I need to improve the synopsis, although the agent thought it was a good one, back when I sent it to him. Still. Or (and) probably develop a little something for the overall story, too, which, now that I think about it, the agent has historically asked me to do anyway, so I should take care of it before he has to. :)
I have great hopes of getting this in to him by a week Friday. That would be v. good. It may be slightly impossible, but it’s a nice dream. :)
