Writer Life & Lessons

March Update: Goals

treeseasonsAt the beginning of the year I set myself four goals: track my daily wordcount, write a minimum of once a week, “sort out” Resilience, and submit my manuscript to someone by July 1st.

March is coming to an end, and it’s time to see how the month went.

i. The Daily Word Count

I wrote for 19 days this month – taking 4-day-gaps twice.

I’ve written 10,882 words, beating last month’s wordcount by around 5000.

Planes Shifter:      From 0   To 6,289

Novella:                    From 4,208      To 4,445

Short Story:            From 0              To  402  [of 500 words]

 

ii. Write Once a Week

I managed this one this month — although my daily wordcount was rarely above 200 words.

As part of this goal, I’m looking at how many days I can write a minimum of 429 words in a row [3,000 a week]. This month, I made a “chain” of 4 days.

iii. Work on Resilience

Due to the setback in Planes Shifter, I’ve merely stared at Resilience this month — which is fine. It’s always meant to be a secondary project — for time when PS is left to sit or submitted for feedback/to an agent.

iv. Work Towards Submission in July

My deadline of July may be a little shaky with the new awareness of issues. It looks like I can salvage around 20 of the 80 scenes — but that leaves a lot to re-write. July is probably a bit early — but we’ll see where I get to by the end of May.

v. Read 24 Books

Not strictly a writing goal, but with my annual attempt to rekindle my label of “avid-reader” I’m trying to set an achievable goal of one book a fortnight.

I read one book this month; and following a bit of plot-analysis, I realised that Mistborn had 6-7 key subplots, while my WIP had 18. Hence feeling the need to continually edit because it just *didn’t work yet*. And thus, with this new insight, the need to re-write.

This Month’s Score:    1/2 

This Year’s Score:       6/6

~

In Other News

* I sent my first three scenes out to beta readers. Thankfully, these are scenes I intend to include in the re-write, so the feedback’s still going to be useful.

* Day-Job / Other Half changes are afoot; with some scary decisions needing to be made.

* I went home to my parent’s house for a weekend to see my mum sing in her choir concert and to see the cats. They’re still fluffy.

* I began the Planes Shifter re-write, following a pep talk from Daphne.

* I went on ‘working with children’ training for Day-Job and finger-painted a tree of the four seasons. There were other things, but I was fairly proud of the tree.

How has your month been?

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