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.

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 Lyons‘ epic 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!