Progress Update
As I mentioned last month, I’ve decided to set a goal for myself of 300,000 words of new fiction this year. I envision the distribution of that to be as follows:
- Finishing The Pericles Conspiracy ~40-50k words
- Writing the next Dawn of Enlightenment book (the sequel to Masters of the Sun) ~80k words
- Writing two sequels to Glimmer Vale ~100k words (~50k each)
- Shorter works ~70k words
I further divided the goal into a goal for each week, to make it easier to digest. Assuming I write for 40 weeks (giving myself all kinds of time off), I need to do 7,500 words each week to meet my goal for the year. Averaging about 1,500 words per hour as I do, that comes out to 5 hours of writing each week. Hardly the epitome of strenuous. Unless you take into account my job, my wife, my four kids, the fact that I have to keep in shape (indeed I have to get in better shape, as I have my eye on a half iron man this coming Autumn), and the fact that I have to things like eat, sleep, and take shower. But still, totally doable.
Going into this year, I knew I would not get much done the first two weeks. Why? Well, Week 1 was still Holiday time, and was actually the time I had off on leave. So while I could have written a bunch, family took precedence, as it should. And Week 2… Well Week 2 was dominated by the release of A Memory of Light, the final Wheel of Time book. As everyone knows who is even slightly acquainted with me, I am a big-time Wheel of Time junkie and a Robert Jordan fanboy. So much so that I signed up for, and was selected to be, one of the Memory Keepers for Brandon Sanderson’s book signing for A Memory of Light here in San Diego. More on that later. Anyway, I knew I wouldn’t write much in Week 2 because I’d be reading a nigh-on 1,000 page volume of awesome.
And it was a volume of awesome. Total awesome.
So anyway, as expected, I got little done those first two weeks: 632 and 1,164 words, respectively.
This week was the first week I’ve really been on the writing horse. And I did well. Check this out, from my goal tracking spreadsheet:
Yup. Met the goal, bringing my total for the year so far to 9,513 words. So I’m well on track to success.
The interesting thing is I tried to work on Pericles. I did. But I got nowhere. So instead I started the Masters sequel (no name yet), and I plugged away at my vampire bunny from outer space story a little. But it was mostly Masters 2 this week. I feel a little bad about that, because I’ve been wanting to finish Pericles for a while now, and it’s a great story, IMHO. But for whatever reason, where I am in it right now is just hard to chug through. So I’ve been cranking on other things instead. I will finish it, though. Before summer, I hope.
So that’s what’s up in my world. I intend to post these progress updates each week as the year goes on, in order to crow or confess the error of my ways and hold myself accountable. I’m also reporting my stats to a thing called Team 250, which a bunch of folks in the Oregon Writers Network (an email list and Yahoo Group for people who have been to Dean and Kris’ workshops) are doing. It’s basically a 250k word goal for the year, with weekly check-ins and statistic tracking. That will help for accountability as well. 🙂
Ok, time to sign off. Hope all is well with y’all. Until next time.