• Meta,  Reading,  Writing

    Writing Report, April 2019

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    April didn’t go quite as intended.

    On the one hand, I did cross another milestone: I wrote “The End” at the end(?) of my novel(?). Use use the (?)s because . . . well . . . it was the logical “end” of the story, although it does leave things in a rather prickly situation. Which is great if you know there’s going to be a book 2. Not so much if it’s supposed to be stand-alone. But I’ve never envisioned this as a stand-alone. And only once I get it rearranged and retooled will it be a novel. But as it stands as I write this between projects at work on April 30th, it is not a novel. “Novel” implies a sort of structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Character arcs. Coherent . . . ness. As it stands, it is 110,000+ words of . . . loosely related anecdotes involving the same characters and in the same universe.

    So, yeah, it is not a novel. There are threads left dangling, characters mentioned once and never brought up again, a suddenly appearing thirteen-year-old son of a secondary character who was convenient to use as a hostage in the final confrontation scene . . . Kid doesn’t even have a name. I called him [HAL’S SON].

    I discovery-wrote my way into some cool stuff, including finding the perfect location in which to set much of my action (and causing a huge difference in the different parts of the story as I have three locations. The final one is a place that is very Atlanta, which is what I want. If my story could take place anywhere, then what’s the point of setting it in Atlanta other than convenience? Most Atlantans will recognize the location I’ve chosen if they have ever driven through Spaghetti Junction, and those who aren’t in Atlanta can google the location and see the structure I’m describing. So it works out.

    Last month, I said, naïvely, that I wanted to finish the thing in April, “so that I can start on the rewrite.”

    Yeah.

    About that . . .

    No. :)

    What had happened was . . . I kept coming up with things to change the plot, not augment it. New ideas about how my magic system works. Who can do what and why. (More of) What my adversary’s reasons are for doing what he’s doing. Etc. So I work through those by free-writing them, and then I also have other ideas for stories, and I’ve written those down with enough notes to help me remember everything without inflicting another Skullcosm on myself.

    Because that was all infinitely more interesting than continuing to attempt to revise and submit some of my finished stories. I mean, I did spruce up one called “C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” (alt title: “Coulromisia”) and submitted that as my work to be critiqued for Write Here, Write Now, which starts day after tomorrow (as I type this). It’s one of the darker things I’ve written. We’ll see what the critters have to say. :) But that is the only story I did anything with in April. I didn’t even submit the rejected story from March to another market because, frankly, I forgot. <sigh>

    Here’s my report.

    April 2019 Writing Report
    April 2019 Writing Report

    Goal Progress

    Finish This Damned Novel – Yay!

    Rewrite This Damned Novel – . . .

    Three More Novel Outlines – Did that as one of my free-writing. So I have enough on all three to participate on a plot break on any or all of them. I think. We shall see which one I pick. :) The problems I have with all three is that they’re too similar to things that already exist, and I need more. Or maybe abandon the ideas if I can’t make them into anything coherent.

    Write Here, Write Now – I leave tomorrow (as I type this; May 1, 2019)

    Read Forty Books – Meh. Maybe if they’re really short books, I can catch up? I have read a lot of short stories and reference stuff. But those don’t count on Goodreads. Well, except the reference books. I have one on autopsies, one on blood spatter, and one on crime scene investigation. You know, a little light reading. :)

    Submit Things To Places – May. May is a good month to send Things out. To Places.


    1. The word I was fishing around for was ‘cohesion.’
  • Writing

    Writing Report, March 2019

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    March was pretty decent. I crossed a milestone I haven’t crossed in quite a while: I wrote 100,000 words on a “novel.” I use quotes because although I did pass 100,000 words in the Scrivener project where I’m writing my novel, many of those words are not . . . good words. They are, in fact, crappy words. Words that I will end up deleting and rewriting because although they seemed the thing to write at the time, they no longer actually make sense in the full novel as I’ve come to understand it. Scenes I don’t need, repetitions of things I’ve already said, exposition that’s more for me than any reader it might eventually have. And I’m nearing the “end” of the “novel,” as well. I wrote the Big Climactic Scene™ — two of them, actually — and only have a the Final Confrontation with Evil™ where the Hero Triumphs™ but at Great Cost™ and then all that cleanup stuff. You know the ‘Bilbo and Sam go back to the Shire and it’s not the same place they left’ part that has to be written but whether or not I’ll keep it all is up for debate.

    I look forward to bringing this sucker to a close in April so that I can start on the rewrite. After I confiscate one of the big white-boards at work after hours and really make myself understand the different plot threads and how they all weave together. I know there are things I introduced that I never came back to. Characters I introduced and then forgot. Characters that I may not even need. And just tonight, I realized that a character I already introduced has a role to fill that cleans up a rather tidy piece of backstory that was bugging me. And would probably stand out instantly to any reader, as well, so that’s good.

    Another thing I did in March was to start looking at some of my older stories with an eye toward making them publishable. I got a rejection on a story from a market I want to eventually make it into. The story I sent wasn’t really in their wheelhouse, but it also wasn’t really out of it, either. So it was a gamble, and it didn’t pay off. I’ll be submitting that story to the next market on my list in April, and hopefully getting a second one ready for submission so I can have two out. And then three. And then four. And then . . .

    I did really well on writing from a consistency standpoint this month. Reading . . . slightly less so. But I read almost every day. When I visited my mother, I didn’t get any reading done, but I also missed a day or two later in the month because of various other reasons. It means it’ll take a little longer to “level up,” but I’ll get there eventually.

    Another thing I did this month was the create yet another spreadsheet (Have I mentioned how much I love Excel? Because I love it a lot.) that will “pretty-print” my little progress table. I tried going from Excel to HTML and it did . . . some odd things. So I abandoned that path and just took a screen shot of the ‘pretty-print’ for March and this is it, right here.

    March 2019 Writing Report
    March 2019 Writing Report

    Goal Progress

    Finish This Damned Novel – So. Close. Probably another 7500 to 10,000 words, and I”ll be done. And then the real fun of rewriting will begin.

    Three More Novel Outlines – Some of it happened? I have . . . things that resemble outlines of part of two of them. I have thirty-three more days to get something that resembles an outline for at least one of them written before . . .

    Write Here, Write Now – I can almost taste Baltimore. It tastes . . . like mouthwash.

    Read Forty Books – It was probably not a great idea to pick Jenn Lyonsepic 560-page tome The Ruin of Kings as the next book I read, but OMG YOU GUYS IT’S SO DAMNED GOOD AND YOU NEED TO BE READING IT RIGHT NOW. There are seventeen chapters of it up on Tor’s site for you to read for free. I linked to it up there! Go! Click! You can get hooked like I did! I’m sure I’ll catch up after I’m done with it and read lots of shorter things. :)

    Submit Things To Places – April. April is a good month to send Things out. To Places.


    1. I do not say this to ‘shame’ my mother, who will read this. I say it because I genuinely would rather spend time with her than read. And I did read some while I was at her house, but it was mostly web pages, and those are hard for me to track. :)
    2. Ten Internet Points to anyone who actually gets this. You can spend them precisely nowhere! But they’ll be yours to keep and be proud of for literally minutes to come!
  • Meta,  Writing

    Writing Report, December 2018 + Year-End Wrap-Up

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    December was a fairly decent month. In spite of a somewhat major holiday and spending quite a bit of time with my mother both at her house and on a vacation trip to south Georgia, I managed to write at least the minimum number of words every day, even when I had Internet speeds that reminded me of 110-Baud modems.

    I had some interesting revelations about a couple of my characters and made copious notes to go back and add some conflict between my two main characters to set up something that happens about halfway through the novel.

    I also finally managed to figure out exactly what my antagonist is doing and why. Like, the details of it. I know that seems silly that I have an outline and am writing on the novel and only just now figured that out. I had the gist of it — with the understanding that it would probably come to me during the writing, which it did — but not the reasoning behind it or the exact order of events. Once I figured out some stuff about the magic in my universe and how it’s used by different mages (and therefore what my antagonist is doing), I was able to make that leap. My notes are in-line in the document itself, so it’s not like I’m going to lose it. :)

    The whole Safari issue is really frustrating. My self-control has never been good, so knowing that I can get to Facebook on Safari means I might as well not block it on my other browsers. I hope they fix that issue (which is a feature they added). Many is the night I’ve gotten my writing for the day done at 3:00 AM because I procrastinated.

    Maybe I can make that part of the ‘game.’ If I go to Facebook after 8 PM, it’s some sort of penalty. Hmm. I’ll work on it.

    For December, 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 27,492
      • Daily average words: 887
    • Time: 1461 minutes (24 hours, 21 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 47:08 min
    • Average words/hour: 1129
    • Chain: 92 days
    • Level: 4 as of 18 December
    • Quota: 350 words per day until 18 December, then 400 words/day

    Yearly Wrap-Up

    For 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 127,701. That’s well over a novel’s worth.
      • Daily average words: 946
    • Time: 9356 minutes (6 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 58:29 min
    • Average words/hour: 819
    • Longest Chain: 92 days
      • Number of chains: 2
      • Total Writing Days: 160
    • Level: 4 as of 31 December
    • Points: 5472 as of 31 December

    There were days prior to August that I wrote and recorded my time, but not the number of words (Really, past me?), so the totals above include that writing time, which is why the words per hour are probably a bit off. In 2019, I will count words and time each time I write, so those numbers won’t get “off” by too much.

    My best (most productive) month was September, with a grand total of 37,243 words written. My worst month was August with only 15,649, but I was only writing for 13 days in August, so that could probably be prorated, but I’ll let it stand. :)

    The most time I spent writing was in September, as well, with 2048 minutes, total, but a surprise is that January was second with 1546 minutes, total, but I didn’t record the number of words I wrote. I suspect a good bit of it was while Weekend Warrior was going on. This was well before I rediscovered the magic writing spreadsheet and started using it daily, but I was using the time-tracking app and kept track of how long I wrote, because that makes sense.

    I plan to keep this going for 2019. I have a good chunk of a rough draft of a novel that I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to write since 2008. It has gone through a number of massive changes as I’ve learned things about writing and revised my characters and my world and figured out a plot that I hope makes sense. Well over half of the total 127,701 words were on short stories, blog posts, the outline, and free-writing to get to something outline-like. Right now, the ‘novel’ is a hopeless mess that needs a lot of help before I would consider letting eyes other than mine see it. I hope that by . . . let’s say April? . . . I might have something resembling a rough draft. <crosses fingers>

    Oh, and you bet your sweet bippy this blog post is going towards my words for 1/1/2019. :) Let’s get the new year off to a decent start with some extra words!

    Magic Writing Spreadsheet 2018, complete
    Magic Writing Spreadsheet 2018, complete

    As a final bonus, if you’re at all interested in what the spreadsheet looks like, here is a screen shot of the 2018 worksheet. You can’t read it as is, but if you click on the image, then click on it again to get the magnified version, you can see every cell, should you feel the desire to do so. :)

    If anyone is interested in obtaining a copy of the sheet . . . well, I could be persuaded to share a blanked-out version. Probably. ;) Alternatively, you could use the one I link to way back in another post, the truly shared one that exists as a Google Doc where you can see everyone else’s progress as well.

    Just know that I found and corrected a major bug in it today as I was preparing the 2019 sheet for the first entry (this blog post), and that extended to the 2020 sheet. If I give you a copy, you’d be on your own for fixing stuff like that.

  • Writing

    On Brainstorming and Burying the Lede…

    Round Table Podcast
    Round Table Podcast

    As you may know, I adore podcasts. I listen to a lot of them. (There’s a not altogether up-to-date list, even.) They are my primary form of entertainment, learning, and news.

    The Round Table Podcast has been around since early 2012, although I didn’t discover it until spring of 2013 or so. As I am wont to do, I started at the very beginning and worked my way forward.

    RTP is hosted by Dave Robison and a “random” co-host. Dave, his co-host, and a pro-writer guest host invite a guest writer to come on with a pitch for a story. The guest writer pitches their story for five to eight minutes, and then, for the next forty-five or so minutes, the three hosts take the story apart, suggesting ways to make it better, where “better” is according to the needs of the writer. For instance, it might need more world-building, or better characters, or something exciting to put in Act 2. Whatever the guest writer is looking for, Dave, his co-host, and the guest host help, starting many phrases with “What if…” and offering up “literary gold.” (Or, as their disclaimer states, “complete bullshit.” I have found that disclaimer to be somewhat disingenuous, because even in the parts that don’t mesh with what the guest writer has in mind, there are nuggets of literary gold. If not for the guest writer, then for some of the listeners. :) ) The guest writer is involved, of course, answering questions, and clarifying any confusion on the part of the hosts.

    It takes a while to work through the back episodes of a new-to-me podcast, because I have many podcasts I do the same thing with, simultaneously. When I discovered RTP, I put the first four or five episodes on in the car when me and my housemate were on the road to visit my mother a few hours away. I remember saying to her (the housemate), “I need to be on this podcast!” Listening to them brainstorm other people’s stories often gave me ideas for my own.

    A couple of months into my catch-up activity, I noticed that no new episodes had appeared in iTunes for a while, and I went to their site to check and — Oh, no! They had gone on indefinite hiatus! (For good reasons, mind you.) I was heartbroken, because I really, really wanted to pitch my novel and be on the show. Crud!

    After about a year (summer, 2014), they came back! I continued catching up. Again with the goal of becoming a guest writer in my mind, but not feeling like I knew enough about what my story was about to pitch it, effectively.

    In February of this year, I decided to make my move. I had enough of an idea what my novel was about that I felt like I could coherently describe it to people. I started slamming episodes, listening to four or five of them at a time. Meanwhile, I went on their site and filled out the form to be a guest writer.

    I got in! :) I won’t try to reproduce the sound I made when I got the email from Dave saying he was interested, but it resembled “squee,” and may have involved (since I was alone at the time) in-chair happy-dancing. I’m sure it was very dignified happy-dancing. You’ll have to trust me, as no video feed of the event exists.

    We recorded my episode last Thursday night (4/12/2016). My “random” co-host was Heather Welliver and my guest host was Kat Richardson, one of my favorite writers in my genre (Urban Fantasy; her Greywalker series is very good and you should read all nine of them). She was one of two names I mentioned in my application under “Who would be your dream guest host?”

    On Tuesday, May 31, an episode called “20 Minutes With Kat Richardson” will go live, and it will involve Dave’s patented stalkery introduction (which can go on for a good fifteen or twenty minutes) of Kat and then a forty- to forty-five-minute interview with her, with questions from both Dave and Heather. Then, a week later, on Tuesday, June 7, Episode 102, with me as the guest writer, will go live. Squee!

    I invite all of you reading this to please go subscribe to The Round Table Podcast. It really is excellent. It’s basically a recorded session of “novel breaking” as practiced at Taos Toolbox and in the unofficial ‘free-time’ parts of Paradise Lost.

    I got some really awesome suggestions. I’m still letting them swirl around in my brain to see what comes of them. I took roughly eight and a half pages of notes, and will end up archiving and listening to my own episode a time or two to get probably a couple more pages.

    Now, a warning. Some people may or may not want to know the full plot of my novel, as they are expected to critique it at some point, and they won’t experience the twists if they listen to the episode and hear me outline the entire plot in 8 minutes. Assuming I don’t completely throw out my current plot based on what Dave, Heather, and Kat said. :) So if you’re among that crowd, just know that listening to the episode will spoil my novel. I’m not sure how badly, because after last Thursday, it may or may not end the same way. :)

    <vague>. . . and not all of my characters may end up being the same people as they are currently.</vague>

    As a side note: I’m a little miffed that I didn’t get to make my joke “on air,” as it were. Before the recording, co-host Heather remarked that we had three -sons on the show: Henderson, Richardson, Robison. Expecting her to make the same comment during the actual recording, I was ready to quip to Heather, “So, does that make you Fred MacMurray?”

    <crickets chirping>

    Oh, no, you don’t! That was damned funny! And now only people who read this site will know the comedy gold they missed out on.


    1. This may seriously be the most pretentious phrase I have ever typed in my life.
    2. Until the extended hiatus, the co-host was almost always Brion Humphrey. After the hiatus, Brion had a new baby and other responsibilities, so now the co-host role is filled by different people in each episode, with a good bit of repeat “offenders.” ;) And “random” is in quotes because they’re selected at least partially based on the genre of the guest writer’s story.
    3. Oh, how wrong I was. Luckily, Dave is good at his job, and gave me some pointers to get my haphazard pitch streamlined and to focus on the parts that mattered, and damn! It worked. I couldn’t be happier with my pitch.
    4. Serially, you goofball, not simultaneously. But on 1.77x speed, which is the fastest I can listen and still understand and get anything out of it.