June update
A little delayed with my monthly update, but I suppose it’s fitting. It’s not even worth sharing the graphs of my writing progress last month. I wrote for a grand total of one day in May for all of 829 words of my 20,000 word goal.
I’m not dwelling on it and I’m not trying to catch up this month, either. I’ve decided to start June on a clean slate and just resume my attempts to get 20,000 words in a month. I’ve missed three days and yesterday I only managed about 60% of my daily word count goal, but every other day I’ve surpassed it by at least 37 words. It still leaves me behind, but not insurmountably.
I struggled with the story a bit recently. A couple of scenes, or attempted scenes, from one character didn’t work out, and another scene took a long time to be able to get down on screen at all. I’ve also been concerned about the pacing of the story. Just today I passed 60,000 words, halfway to my ultimate goal of 120,000, and I feel like there is not enough story left to fill those 60,000 words.
However, in the course of plantsing this story, I’ve ended up writing a lot of exposition that could be better presented. So for now, I think, I’m going to continue writing as I have been, letting the words flow as they will, ending the story short of my word count goal if need be, and going back to expand upon all that narration later. I’ve already decided that my opening scene is going to be different from how I wrote it, and the failed scenes of more recently will need to be reworked before I can consider a first draft done. If I’m going to make my soft goal of having the book ready within three and a half years of publishing book two (out next week!! preorders open now!!), I’m going to need to go back through those scenes and flesh them out properly within my stated (if now expanded) goal for having the first draft done this year. I can do this, and I’m rebuilding momentum on it already.
Aside from writing, I did a little bit of art, as shared here. Guitar and Japanese lessons continue, if somewhat less consistently. One other thing I did was finally return to my TBR list. I had a few shorter books on it which I managed to knock out in one day each, and have now read eight books within about three weeks. Why do I forget how much I enjoy reading? Oh right, because video games.
And so, here’s to a good start—er, continuation—of June. Hard to believe the year’s almost half over now. Haven’t we been having 30-week months since lockdown began?
