Quick Update

In the past few weeks I hit a couple of milestones in my writing goals for the year:   I reached both 300,000 words and 1000 pages.   The word count goal is the most important, as I’ve tried to keep myself to a thousand words a day all year.  This really keeps me motivated, even on days that I don’t feel like writing.  It’s good to see the totals add up in the little Excel spread sheet that I use to track my writing.  At this pace, it looks like I could go over 400,000 words for the year. 

I consider this quite an accomplishment.  I’ve never maintained that pace at any time in the past, but I’ve found it very doable this year, particularly with the extra time afforded since retiring from my full time job.  The 400K words is all short stories or novellas, but I think it’s a good number, as I am eventually planning to move more fully into novels, and this represents the number of words necessary for perhaps three novels of good length, or perhaps four even if we go with a more standard length.  

Now no, I don’t plan to work toward writing four novels a year.  I think that’s asking for too much, and probably stretching the creativity too thin.  I think I will be happy with writing one to two first draft novels a year, interspersed with some short stories and novellas.  The rest of the time will be spent on revision, which is something I haven’t done enough of this year. 

Revise, revise, revise, or so they tell me. 

Also on the good news front, I just had another couple of sales to Every Day Fiction.  They're flash pieces; one is called “Annie’s Book,” and the other "Nikki Comes Home."  They should be coming out in October or November.