November and December Writing, a Yearly Review, and Looking Forward to 2018
Firstly, I’ve uploaded a blank version of the Excel spreadsheet I use to track my writing progress. You’re welcome to download and use it if you find that helpful! It’s pretty straightforward and no-nonsense, but it does the trick. I kept track some of 2015 before I fell off the wagon, but I’ve consistently tracked throughout 2016 and 2017.
November & December
The last two months of 2017 were decently productive. As it felt like I did the whole year, a lot of it was editing. In the early part of November, I did a re-read of the co-written book, and then me and Elizabeth May sent it off to our agents. In between, I did a small on spec proposal for a video game company. I didn’t get the gig, sadly, but they did pay me for trying out, which was nice, and I had fun with the pitch anyway. After that, I had notes back from my agent on another book, a near-future thriller. It needed a decent amount of work, which I’d suspected. But I must admit, the thought of re-writing this book for the third time did make me groan!
I worked through the existing outline by going through John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, step by step, to stress test what I had so far. Though sometimes prescriptive advice can be irritating, in this case, because I already had a draft, it was really useful to see what was working and what needed to change, especially in conjunction with Juliet’s notes. By the end of the month, I had a plan I was happy with.
Fiction: 13,963 words (this includes planning notes, as that’s just as useful as prose)
Non-fiction: 8,200 words (blogging, Napier work)
Total: 21,090 words
December meant I had to actually start editing the thriller. That was what I worked on for most of the month, along with a short story that will be going live soonish. On Christmas Eve (!), I got notes on the co-written book from Juliet, but thankfully they weren’t as intense as the thriller notes. It was mostly a nip and a tuck, and I also could split them with my co-writer. So the tail end of the month was starting on those and putting the thriller on hold for a little bit. It’s very hard to edit two books concurrently, even if they’re as different as these books are. I can work on projects concurrently if I’m at different stages in the process, but otherwise it’s challenging.
I also went on a weekend writing retreat with Elizabeth and Hannah Kaner, over in Penrith, so that was a nice chance to get in some words and also explore a different part of the country.
Fiction: 23,250 words
Non-fiction: 8,537 words (blogging, prepping for school visits, Napier work, an application for a residency)
Total: 30,187 words
A Look Over the Year
So, in total in 2017:
Fiction: 214,592 words (591 words per day)
Nonfiction: 74,340 (203 words per day)
Total: 288,932 (791 words per day)
I’m pretty happy with that. I’m not someone who writes masses in a day. I am slow and steady, but as ever, this shows that it adds up. This is a little more than I wrote in 2016 (261,589), and probably about as much as I’ll write in 2018. I’d like to get up to 300,000 because that’s a nice round number, but I’m not that bothered. I know that this is a pace that’s comfortable for me.
Project-wise, this year, I:
Finished the first draft of the thriller. Re-planned and edited that once. Re-planned it again and started editing/re-writing it a third time. This is currently my shortest book: third draft is projected to be around 70,000 words.
Finished the first draft of the co-written book. Re-planned and edited that once. Started re-editing it again. This is my longest book (though I only wrote about half of it!). Third draft is projected to be around 130,000 words.
I wrote most of a short story (7k), a novella (20k, though I need to expand it on a re-draft), and half of another novella (12k so far). They are fun, contemporary, slightly geeky romances that I wrote mostly to give myself a break from the death and super high stakes in the above. I’m considering self-publishing these under a pseudonym this year once I have more of a backlist. I worked on that mostly in the first half of the year and then fell off it in the second half.
In self-publishing, I also formatted and released “The Mechanical Minotaur,” “Through the Eyes of a Bluebird,” and “Creatures of Celebrity,” which are tie-in stories for Masquerade, False Hearts, and Shattered Minds, respectively.
I also did the @Ver_acity Twitter story with Emily Still and wrote a first draft of a short story for another thing.
The nonfiction was a lot of promo for both Masquerade and Shattered Minds, which came out this year. I also did a fair number of events this year and kept teaching part-time.
Lastly, I came up with a few more ideas for books to go into the queue, and thought about the ones that are coming up soon.
Plenty enough for one year, I’d say!
Looking Forward: 2018
As I mentioned in my resolutions post last week, a lot of what I’ll work on this year creatively is currently up in the air. If I sell these projects I’m almost finished editing (man, I hope they sell), they both have follow ups, so that will keep me busy. I have two other books at the forefront of the queue I’d at least like to plot, and I’m going to keep playing around with the romances. I find them fun and they stretch my writing ability in a different way. I also like the idea of learning more about self-publishing. I learned some from short-stories, but the market for standalone shorts is very small, and none of those releases have earned that much of a profit.
But no matter what, I’ll just keep chipping away at projects and keeping track and probably put up bi-monthly updates.
What are your writing goals this year, and how do you track them?
