Tag: State of the Author

Categories
State of the Author

State of the Author: Week Ending 07/28

I’m sad to say this is probably going to be the last weekly SotA post we see for quite some time. Not because I’m quitting or anything, just simply because my writing pace is going to be drastically decreased now that summer vacation is officially over. Somehow, I don’t think anyone wants to read about me coming home, taking a nap, staring at a wall and considering doing some writing… Before deciding to just go to sleep at 7pm.

Yeah. Teaching is kind of a hobby-eater (especially in the months of August and May).

But, I did manage to “go out with a bang” so to speak with this last week in that I more than doubled my monthly word count in 8 days.

Writing: This week of Write Like a Pro asked us to follow J. K. Rowling’s writing routine, which wasn’t too bad. But, there are these NaNo Crawls based on all 7 Harry Potter books that I’ve been wanting to do for ages and never could convince myself to sit down and do. So, knowing that I don’t often back down from a challenge, I added them to this week’s WLaP. And let me tell you… They are intense. This link will take you to Year One. Which is one of the “easier” of the seven crawls. Yeah. I’m a little tired of writing right now and am definitely taking this week fully off. Which means it’s the end of the month, so, some stats for those curious:

july stats

That is, of course, assuming I do fully take these last few days off (which, I probably will). The chart on the left is the breakdown of where my time and words went this month. Pretty self explanatory, I think. The chart on the right shows the breakdown of how many words I wrote during each year of the Harry Potter crawl — the year 7 one took me two days, and year 4 took me an extra two hours, but all the others I did within the JKR WLaP time, so that’s exciting.

I have always been a binge-writer more than a consistent-writer, so doing an insane amount of words like that is “normal” for me, but I don’t recommend cramming that many lengthy crawls into that short a period of time. Since I was only writing for 6-8 hours most days, my hands / wrists weren’t really affected much (maybe because of the compression gloves I wear whenever I’m writing for more than 4 hours in a day), but I am incredibly tired of my FMC in the Bluebell Fields books. She’s a little on the annoying side normally, but when I’ve spent that much time in the universe / with her? Completely. Done.

The nice thing about that? I can technically be done with her because her novels are now both written! Of course, she’s still a prominent side character in SoL, and I’m still working on edits, but… Well, whatever. Fact is, I finished a freaking novel this month. Yay me. 😀

Editing: I’ve started putting the paper edits of Sky of Light into the computer — which is where those words came from in that novel. I have 21 scenes that need to be rewritten within the novel from the paper edits and 5 of them are basically full chapters. I’ve done one of the small scenes (barely a paragraph) and also tackled 3 of the chapters. I also spent a fair bit of time working through some of my edits from the beta project. That is going to take priority for the time being, despite wanting to distance myself from April a little. But, there’s also other people waiting / helping with that and I want to respect their time.

Upcoming: From here forward, you’ll be seeing less activity on the blog. Instead of two posts a week, I’m going to be dropping down to just my Wednesday post, except at the beginning of the month, when I update with my monthly goals and at the end when I post my wrap-up post. So, really, I’m going from 8 posts a month to 6. Which is really not that different, I guess.

Regardless, Wednesday will be a tag post this week! Look forward to that. 😉

Categories
State of the Author

State of the Author: Week Ending 07/21

Oh my heavens, what a week. I have officially gone “back to school” this week, in that I don’t have students, but there were meetings and planning happening (both on campus and off), my brain had to be turned back on, and also… Real pants were a thing that had to be worn. Which, honestly, is my least favorite part of working. I think this is the first year I’m not super excited to be going back to work after summer break. There’s a variety of reasons for that, I imagine, but one of them is definitely because I’ve really been enjoying the two months of getting to pretend to be an actual, legitimate, full time writer. And truthfully? I’m just not ready to give that up yet.

However, without work, I would have to instead give up my apartment and like… Groceries. Which I am definitely not willing to give up.

Knowing that my life is about to get significantly busier, I found myself wondering if there was a way to possibly make my writing life and my teaching life play nicely together and decided that this week, while I had work — but not students — would be a good time to try an experiment. So, I decided that I would work my full 8 hour day, as required, and then at some point during the day, make the time to write 5k words, edit for a minimum of 2 hours, and still complete my module for my class this week.

And… Well. It was a week.

Writing: For fear of sounding like I’m bragging, 5k words a day for me isn’t really a challenge. Now, it’s not as quick as it used to be when I was consistently writing 4-4.5k per hour, but even still, 5k words is approximately 2 hours of “normal” work for me at this point — 3 hours if I’m having a day where writing just isn’t coming as nicely as it usually does. But something I forgot was how much writing 5k a day boosts your total word count! I went from a decent amount to HOLY COW amounts over the week. And that was pretty awesome. Some of the words are definitely a little on the rambling side, but nothing too extreme. I’m usually wordy in my zero drafts anyway and then I end up cutting about 15-20k on my first read through before I even do any “real” editing, so being a little rambling at this stage isn’t a surprise to me at all.

I successfully completed Mandi Lynn’s #10kWritingChallenge today with about 12k words. So, woo!

SOTA3

Editing: The paper edits are finished! I spent a few hours last night writing out my revision outline and am working on replotting / reorganizing the order of events in the middle of the novel to build relationships more organically… And I’m also really focusing in on not dropping my subplots 14-16 chapters into the (currently) 32 chapter novel. There’s a lot of rewriting that needs to be done to fix old POV shifts that were never cleaned up in previous drafts. So, that’s fun.

The AW Beta Project is officially over. We’ll be talking about that in much more detail on Wednesday.

Words Written: 68,587
Chapters Edited: 32
Hours Spent Editing: 47
Scenes Rewritten Completely: 1 / 21
Scenes Cut Out: 18

Publishing: Still trucking along with this! Module two was long, but awesome. It was a lot of information about metadata and publishing on different vendors. I’m still working through some of the more specific details and things. But still going well!

Next week’s goals:

  • Finish all 7 days of the Harry Potter Crawl for WLaP
  • Edit 2 hours daily
  • Complete Module 3 of Publish and Thrive
Categories
State of the Author

State of the Author: Week Ending 07/14/19

It’s been a long time since I’ve been this productive two weeks back-to-back! I’ve been excited to work on my revision and publication course especially, but even the writing part of the month is going well! It’s honestly confusing me — but I’m definitely not complaining!

Writing: This week’s #50in5 was much more successful than last week — I was done with it in just under 4 hours. The flow was better, my life cooperated more, and I was into a better plotted out segment of the novel that wasn’t as research-heavy as the week before. So, here’s another (very rough) excerpt from this week’s work:

SOTA2.PNG

Editing: I am almost 75% finished with the paper edits and then I’ll move into the computer edits. This will be equally as time consuming as the paper edits have been. Reason being? The paper edits do have the majority of the nitty-gritty work, but the computer edits will also contain the reorganizing and rewriting of all the scenes that I marked as needed rewritten (mostly for POV shifts). Realistically, I’m hoping to be fully finished with this draft by the end of August and then hopefully out with some betas after that!

The AW Beta Project is still going swimmingly. I actually got two beta requests! And the person running it told me that my entry was actually the first one requested! It absolutely blows my mind that was how that played out — I honestly expected to get zero requests out of the whole thing! — and I think that’s been a large part of what’s been keeping me motivated this month. There’s something incredibly inspiring knowing that there are people who might actually want to read the craziness in my brain.

#50in5 Words Written: 22,030
Chapters Edited: 26
Hours Spent Editing: 23.25
Scenes Rewritten Completely: 0 (yet — 8 are slated / marked for a rewrite)
Scenes Cut Out: 16
Beta Requests Sent: 1
Beta Requests Received: 2

Publishing: As expected, the Sarra Cannon Publish and Thrive course is absolutely amazing. I worried when I initially signed up / paid for it that I would end up having some buyer’s remorse once the payment process. Not because I didn’t think the course would be good / worth it, but because I’m not earning money right now and for someone without an income, it was a lot of money. And I’ve definitely had to get a little creative with bill paying now because I decided to take the course. However, I think it was the best thing I’ve done for myself all year. Even in the “introductory” module, I learned a lot, which is great. But even beyond that, I’ve really been building relationships with other people in the course.

Which probably sounds silly and like some sort of hoity-toity markety nonsense. But as a romance / realistic fiction writer with a majority of speculative writer friends, I’ve found a small collection of writers who write in my exact subgenre of romance. And that has been super awesome in and of itself. Plus, the Facebook group is incredibly supportive and social and it’s been a very much needed social engagement in the middle of my otherwise relatively lonely summer.

I am unfortunately on campus for work all week next week, so my summer is essentially over at this point, despite students still having just under a month before they’re back, so my goals this week should be lighter than normal, right? Well, yes, if I were a sane person. But I’m not. So, next week’s goals:

  • Write 5k daily (except Friday and Sunday)
  • Write 10k Friday and Sunday (for #50in5 and Mandi Lynn’s 10k Challenge)
  • Edit 2 hours daily
  • Complete Module 2 of Publish and Thrive

Hope everyone else is succeeding in meeting their goals as well!

Categories
Lazy Tequila Afternoons Books State of the Author

State of the Author: Week Ending 07/07/19

It has been quite a productive week for me in terms of writing-related things. Which is great! If every week would mimic this one, I would be beyond happy with my progress. Of course, that’s not possible, and if it were, it would only be a matter of time before I’d accept it as normal and start pushing myself to do more… So, for now, I’ll just focus on the successes.

Writing: As mentioned, I’m working on drafting the initial draft of Rainstorms in Bluebell Fields, which is a sequel and my #50in5 project. So far, I’ve only worked on it one day, and am sitting at 10.3k words on it after that day. It wasn’t a good day for my Real Life, so I wasn’t sure I was going to make my 10k that day, but I pushed through and eventually succeeded. Sure, I’m disappointed that it took me nearly the entire day to accomplish my daily count, but considering there was a large portion of time that I honestly thought I was just going to quit / give up and pick another day to hit my 10k? Yeah, I’m pretty pleased. The words themselves are pretty rough because, well, it was not the best / easiest writing day, but also because I hadn’t done nearly enough prep / research for the first half of the novel. That said, they’re still words, and I’m still proud of them, so here’s an excerpt (please be kind and remember this is a very rough first draft):

RBF Chapter 1 Excerpt.PNG

Editing: Still trucking along here as well. I got hung up a smidge the one day because I realized a major scene was missing from the printed draft I am working through and had to go track it down. Once I accomplished that, I realized that I seemed to have combined two different drafts when printing and had old versions of chapters, some with beta comments from ages ago, and multiple repeated scenes, so I had to spend almost an hour sorting through things and notating where things belonged and all of that. It was by far the most stressful thing I’ve had to do so far while editing.

I’m still participating in AW’s Beta Project and have already submitted my 3 required crits. There are at least 6 more that I’m interested in completing and deciding if I want to ask for a full beta of. One of the 3 assigned to me was one I was initially interested in, based on reading hooks alone, so I went ahead and requested a full beta of that one. They’re only looking for someone to read and comment on their structure, so it will be a quick beta job. I feel like I could take on two more of a similar commitment or one more that’s more intensive, so we’ll see how I feel over the course of the next week while I’m working my way through the other 6 crits I’d like to submit.

#50in5 Words Written: 10,314
Chapters Edited: 13
Hours Spent Editing: 7.5
Scenes Rewritten Completely: 0 (yet — 3 are slated / marked for a rewrite)
Scenes Cut Out: 7
Beta Requests Sent: 1
Beta Requests Received: 2 (omggggggg <3)

Publishing: I’m not quite on this step myself yet, but I am working through Sarra Cannon’s Publish and Thrive course to help build my arsenal of personal knowledge and resources. I’m still putting the final touches on my pre-course workbook, but for the most part found the reflection on what I want to get from my career and the places I consider things to be most important very helpful… As well as significantly harder than I expected any of the questions to be! Definitely looking forward to continuing through the rest of the modules over the next several weeks. (Registration closes very soon on this course, so if you’re interested / considering signing up, make sure to do it ASAP!)

Well, that’s my current state of progress and accomplishment for this week. Next week, I have a few more specific goals:

  • Fully flesh out my military / intelligence research notes for Rainstorms in Bluebell Fields.
  • Add another 10k to Rainstorms in Bluebell Fields on 07/12.
  • Edit 8 more chapters of Sky of Light.
  • Complete 6 additional Beta Project Crits.
  • Complete Module 1 of Publish and Thrive.
  • Add 5 (completed) pages to my LTA Series Bible

What about you guys? What have you done this week? What are your goals for this week? Let me know by leaving a comment below!