Another month has flown by, which perhaps isn’t surprising as time does tend to pass, but that means it’s a good opportunity for a look back on the month and a review of the work going forward.
I’ve been kept suitably busy at work but still managed to do a bit of writing, although in the last week of February I did come down with food poisoning so that threw me out for a good few days.
To review my nutshell goals from February were:
- Finish The Business of Spiderwebs
- Begin work on The Priest of Ashen Bone
- See if I can’t beat my word count for January (15,600 words)
How’d I do?
Finish The Business of Spiderwebs
Done!
Well, I’ve finished the first draft which actually puts me about a week (or one illness’s worth) behind schedule for it so I’m okay with that delay. I should have the second draft ready by the end of the week to be sent out to a few people.
But if anyone fancies giving it a read through for comments on my next draft then I’d be more than happy to hear from you!
Begin work on The Priest of Ashen Bone
Not yet.
I’ve got the plans 90% finished but all the plans for the characters are on their own pages. So the next step is to transfer the bullet points of the plan onto a document where I will write the book properly. It’s a slight change from my usual methodology for writing from a plan but then again my usual method is to WRITE A BRIEF PLAN IN ALL CAPS IN THE DOCUMENT and then delete it as I go along.
I’m hoping detailed bullet points will help my productivity and poring over the plan in the past few days has renewed my excitement for the storyline. The scope is a bit more epic than the first book.
I can guarantee there are 150% more dinosaurs in this book than there were in the first one.
Beat my word-count for January – 15,600 words
Nope!
This month I only got to 10,500 words.
I could use the excuse that this is because it’s a shorter month but let’s be honest – 3 days shouldn’t make a 5,000 word difference. I think I have struggled more getting this short story down as I’m not one to word-vomit onto the page, I like to do some minor editing as I go which can just be pausing for a minute to try and find a better word but I have been doing that more (perhaps too much) with Business of Spiderwebs as I am aware of just how much more you have to make every word count in a short story.
Plan for March
- Word-Count Goals: 10,500 – 15,600 words
Again, I’m going to try and beat my previous months word-count for March. My minimum goal is to beat February at 10,500 and my best practice goal is to beat my current high score for 2017! I think that writing some of the novel will help me push it up quite a bit as I won’t be quite as rigorous on myself with the first draft but we’ll see.
- Write at least 7,500 words of The Priest of Ashen Bone
I was going to put 10,000 for this goal then realised that would be my entire low-end goal for my word-count… so as that’s the case I’m going to be conservative and say 7,500 written for the first draft of the book. I’m hoping that a gentler goal will mean I can thoroughly pass it and make a bigger goal for next month!
- Finish a new short story and get Business out to critique
So far I’m two for two at writing one short story per month this year and definitely want to continue that trend through the whole year.
My short story for January was a prompt piece and I’m not sure how much I love it so I might revisit it and see how I like it. But February’s The Business of Spiderwebs is one I am excited about so I want to make sure I work on that as much as I can and see if I can place it anywhere.
Looking through my list of short stories I want to write I think that might top two right now are:
- The Honeyed Alchemist – A gentleman alchemist tries to decipher the workings of an ancient cult and discover the secret to immortality
- Orphans of the Quay – A group of children, living in an abandoned fishing quay, fight to stay where they are with the help of their adoptive, eldritch mother
At the moment the front-runner is The Honeyed Alchemist as I’ve already tried to write it once as a discovery write but it didn’t work out too well as I kept thinking of new ways to try the story which kept meaning total re-writes. Now I want to have a proper plan in place before I tackle it again because I think the best way to write it needs a past/present thing going on and I need a plan for that.
Otherwise I would also like to be more active on the blog so will attempt to make at least one(!) post that isn’t an update of what I’m up to – even if it’s just a review.
So that’s what’s on the cards for March! Let’s get to it!