lizvogel

Falling From Ground: 3238

And that was it for September. (Could've sworn I'd worked on Green Ring, but apparently that was last month.) I was hoping for more, but there were a couple of week-long stretches of no writing, so I really should be glad it's as good as it is. And it ain't bad, really.

More consistency would give better results, however. Already working on that, having written at least a little bit today.

Queries sent: 4

And 4 other agents crossed off (and two more that I spent ages researching, only to go with another at the same agency). Not as much as I need to do, but it's still progress.


For October: More of the same. Work on writing more consistently, which will get the word count up. Get more queries out. And it wouldn't hurt to have another go at the short stories; most of them are back in the stable, and should go out again.

2015 new words in July, all on Falling From Ground.

Which is not as high as I would've liked, but really is pretty good for getting back in the groove again.


No submissions or queries.


What really matters, though, is that I have come up with a what's-going-on for the novel! It's not the cleverest and most cunning idea ever, but it ticks the necessary boxes and has the right sort of "feel"; my back-brain seems comfortable with it.

And yes, as soon as I came up with it and decided it might just work, I started coming up with ways to work bits of reveal into some of the scenes I know are coming up. It's a lot easier to do reveal when you know what you're revealing!

So what worked?

I did a spiderweb-map of all the characters and their interrelations. Didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but it may have helped get my brain thinking about "who" instead of "what".

I drove around doing errands while listening to unrelated music.

And... I said last month that I had one more trick to try. Since I'm dealing with memory and conflicting memories, a writer-friend suggested that I "follow the smells". Smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory, and conveniently I already had a lot of smell-description in the text. I had envisioned this as a deep-thinking task, laying in a quiet room without interruptions (yeah, right) and immersing myself in sense-impressions, probably for hours. But I was thinking about it while puttering around with something else, contemplating what smell I would start with and how I would progress from there, and all of a sudden the smell of the safe-house connects to the smell of X's office. And damn, there it was; the connection from the memory-events to the causation, and the character that was driving it all.

So then I drove around doing errands and listening to unrelated music some more, and the basic skeleton of the thing blossomed forth into my brain as if of its own accord. I've said all along if I knew who, I'd know what (or vice versa), and yep, as soon as I had X, I had roughly what he was doing and why. I don't know X's name yet, but I know him.

A little grinding and polishing, some very minor backfills to shore up a couple of points, and I've got a workable plot.


The relief is overwhelming.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So, going forward:

Now that I've got a plot, it's time to get some words down. This book has been troublesome from the start; I looked back at my records, and the only month I topped 5K was when I was going down the wrong track entirely, headed for a train-wreck. So I'm not going to make pronouncements about high count goals. But let's see some steady progress, eh?

And, as one of my favorite founts of writing wisdom likes to say, editors do not conduct house-to-house searches. Submit, and query.

February:
original short fiction = 3 (just a title, really)
Green Ring = 2942
Falling From Ground = 4457
Total new words in February = 7402

March:
Falling From Ground = 79

April:
Falling From Ground = 2620

Okay, so March was a fustercluck of a month. I knew that. April was supposed to be the month I went back to the A-Z mystery short story that's been languishing, but instead it got bogged down in this expletive-deleted novel, which I swear I just need to finish one conversation to get to the end of the chapter (actually a 4-chapter-length conglomeration, but this would definitely be the end of *a* chapter), and I just cannot get it to go. If I'm more than 500 words from the break I'd be surprised, but no, the alpha reader's getting another stops-in-mid-scene chunk. Argh.

(February kind of rocked, though.)


In other goals, I did get a new email account set up in February, and by mid-March had tested it enough to be satisfied in paying for a year. It's not perfect, but it does the things that are deal-breakers for me, and the things it doesn't do I mostly don't mind working around. Final clean-out of the old email accounts is in progress.

With that done, I haven't gotten back to querying, but I have at least been sending out some short stories:

February: 1 submission sent

March: 3 subs sent

April: 5 subs sent

I currently have four stories out there in slush land. My game plan is to send out two for every one rejection; eventually that should lead to everything being out there, though it gets trickier with the things that have been making the rounds for a while.


For May: Words, dammit. Keep stories out. At least glance at agents lists and query.

November:

original short fiction: 800
Falling From Ground: 2649
Total new words in November: 3449

Decent, especially with alpha-feedback to incorporate. The 800 words was a complete short story, begun as prompt fic and completed in one sitting.


December:

original short fiction: 43
Falling From Ground: 4265
Total new words in December: 4308

Not bad for what I was kind of treating as a relax-a-month, and which is always a bit crowded with the holidays and whatnot. I'm still waffling about a plot, but I've finally got a next-bit that will lead to more next-bits, and will let me introduce several elements I've been looking forward to.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I'm not much of one for New Year's resolutions, but I do have two writing-related ones. It's time to bring back my 5000-words-a-month quota; if the novel gets stuck, I need to remember that I've got plenty of short stories to play with. And, by the end of January I should have at least one new email account set up and tested.

And that's enough to be going on with.

Has it really been since May that I've not done one of these?

Wordcount hasn't been the point of the exercise lately: first I was doing Highway of Mirrors revisions, and then I was working on getting Falling From Ground booted back up. And, indeed, on writing anything at all, which is always a frustrating horse to climb back up on.

But, just for the record, here's the counts for the last few months:

May
HoM: 13
original short fiction: 997
Total new words in May: 1010

June
HoM: 273
Total new words in June: 272

July
HoM: 645
original short fiction: 706
Total new words in July: 1351

August
HoM: 32
original short fiction: 219
FFG: 2783
Total new words in August: 3034

September
Green Ring: 1513
FFG: 2559
Total new words in September: 4072

(And yes, I deliberately held this through September to make the numbers look better.)

Mars continues to be the Franken-novel. I'll write a line here or a paragraph there, then gradually stitch them all together. Apparently I am going to write the whole damn novel that way. But at least the stitching's going well.

My time management, on the other hand, is shot to hell. I'm working just a day or so more than I want to be, and that plus the pressing house projects seems to be sucking my time away before I even see it. (I know plenty of people manage to write with full-time jobs and far more demands on their time than I have. I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm just having trouble with it atm.) Part of the problem is that right now, the writing process is taking quite a while to boot up each time, so if I can't clear about four hours at a stretch, I'm unlikely to have much to show for it. This is partly a function of Mars being obstreperous, and partly a function of being out of practice -- but of course I can't get into practice unless I can make time to write. And the only way I seem to be able to do that is to let everything else go to hell, and some of the bills for doing that previously are coming due.

But, as the counts above show, the trend's getting better. And at least I'm at the point where the rest of the ideas I originally had for FFG come in. I expect to hit a wall when I get through those, but it'll be the old ~30K wall, familiar territory. It makes an ugly splatting noise, but I know what to do about it.


October's goals: Decent progress on FFG, and at least check in with Green Ring and/or the A-Z story. Find a way to steal a day for email research, and at least get that a little farther forward.

Mostly, keep writing.

So much for posting more often. ;-P

original short fiction: 2222
Total new words in March: 2222

Yeah, all right. Better than I feared, worse than I hoped, and I need to get my act in gear. (Not least because if the writing brain doesn't get exercised via writing, it takes it out in anxiety dreams. The last couple nights were doozies.)

What I hadn't realized is that I didn't submit anything in March. Bad writer. That flurry of stuff I sent out in February had mostly come back, so it's not like I didn't have inventory.

Made some progress with investigating new email services. Hushmail would be a contender except for the lack of spell-check; Inbox looks promising, but there's a couple things I can't check without a test account to play with. Must get my act in gear on that one!


April goals: Get the bloody Highway of Mirrors revision put to bed (still waiting on beta reader). Get email back to functionality. Get at least one story out, to the nice people who told me to send them something else if I had it. And get enough writing done that I can at least sleep at night.

Highway of Mirrors revisions: 2489
original short fiction: 16
Total new words in January: 2505

I'd have liked more, but wordcount is not the point of revision. And the revisions are going well, all things considered. I've gotten stuck into the plotty bits in the later chapters that I was afraid were a disaster; in fact, they're just... not quite there. With surprisingly small changes of actual text, I'm taking what were strands running parallel to each other and knitting them together so they converge on more or less the same point, which I think may be the difference between a handful of events and a "plot". I'd like to claim that this is what I meant all along -- I mean, the bits are all there, seemingly waiting for this -- but I can't say it with a straight face.

I've also changed one thing from being data that my characters are given, to data that they find out. It's not a big thing (just the code name of an operation), but I think it's having an impact beyond its size, making them seem much more investigate-y and clever.

The characterization tweaks I added to the earlier chapters were things I meant from the start, but now they're actually on the page for the readers to share. ;-)

I'm laughably over my mental deadline, but my deadline was laughably unrealistic -- or rather, I'd figured on a week to do the logic-fix I turned out not to need, and maybe a couple of the easier character-tweaks, and then print it out to review for plot issues and give it to the alpha-reader simultaneously. That's somehow turned into a full chapter-by-chapter review (the chapters out of order, which is an interesting focusing technique) and everything-I-can-catch overhaul, which turns out to be a lot more than I thought I could do without hard copy. Once I've got the last of the currently-handwritten bits wedged in (which have come to me variously over time), and the last of the newly-introduced brackets removed, and the knock-on changes from the above followed through, then I'll print it out for both the housemate and myself to do a full read-through. And then we'll see what we shall see.


Oh, yeah; I also got one short story submitted.


For February: Finish this revision pass and get the print-out printed out.

I'd like to get another short story finished. The idea that spun off from a library presentation on screenwriting last summer recently acquired a half-page of handwritten fix, and the main character now has an actual reason for being where she is. (That one, I think was in the back of my brain all along; it just took a while to get to the front.) That might be a good candidate.

Everything that can be in a slush pile right now, should be.

The email issue remains. I wish I could switch gears better; maybe once I get to the print-out stage of revision, I'll stop feeling like every free day has to go to that, and can catch up on some admin work.

But mainly, the revisions.

Gods, I need to do a wordcount post for last month. If I'm not writing anything, I can at least total up what I've already written.

original short fiction: 5721
Falling From Ground: 248

Total new words in November: 5969

Hey, that's not bad! The short fiction is entirely "Cold Day In Spells"; a chunk of it's the same chunk that's been recycling around various versions, but there's plenty of new attached to it now. The FFG bit is the solution to my extended stuck-ness (about which there'll be a proper post someday, probably), so those few words carry much weight.

No querying, because in addition to working on a new query, my email provider has decided to randomly delete emails. Or not so randomly, as all the ones I'm sure are missing have subjects starting "Re: Query: ".... I need a new email provider, obviously, and querying's on hold til I find one.


December will be taken up with baking and the usual this time of year, but I'll sneak a few words in.

original short stories = 62
Green Ring = 2720
Falling From Ground = 2901

Total new words in September = 5683

Oh, nice! I really wasn't sure what I was going to have to show for this month. Turns out there was more nice, steady plodding than I'd realized.

Green Ring and FFG are definitely good counterpoints to have going in tandem, allowing me to switch moods when I need to.

Queries sent = 3 (plus two researched & crossed off)

Not bad! I am, if not getting back on the wagon, at least trotting along in its wheel-ruts, thanks to a little light butt-kicking from assorted quarters.

Short stories submitted = 2

For the trifecta!


Goals: More of the same. Get the other stories that are ready for it out there somewhere. Keep on with the writing.

For querying, I would really like to get through the entire list of possibles (AAR trawl + misc. bookmarks) by the end of this year. That will require a rather higher rate than I've yet done, but with that goal in mind, it seems like it should be feasible. Even if it will then leave me with a quandary for the new year. But that's next year's trouble.

Onward.


Edited because the post that gets posted in October isn't October's word count as this originally said, it's September's. I knew there was something about this one that was bugging me; I'm just embarrassed it took me until nearly November to figure out what.

Didn't realize I'd skipped this last month, but then, June had other things going on. So, another double header!

June:

Green Ring = 201

Short stories submitted = 2


July:

original short fiction = 435
Falling From Ground = 2522
Total new words in July = 2957

Short stories submitted = 3

A decent show at getting back on the horse, I think. Also, FFG has now topped the 10K line again, which is nice. Hopefully it's with words that'll stay this time.


For August, I don't want to get too hard-core yet for fear that upping the pressure will shut down the flow, but a soft target of 3000 words should be feasible. And I really should get back to querying.